Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They held Archivist Juno Zeta’s child in the vat-womb for an extra week to see if maybe he would put on a little extra plumpness. The result, when finally decanted, was still pathetically scrawny.

“I hope he’s a necromancer,” fretted his father, Scholar Lykomedes Sei. He was hard to see in the child; his face was too sharp and angled to translate to a baby. Juno Zeta glanced at him in puzzlement — Lykomedes Sei was a necromancer who had never shown a lick of inclination to ply aptitude to ambition; he was soft, basically. He was in love — just not with anyone or anything in particular. He crafted flimsy flowers and studied 89th century poetry with the same pensive reverence — and to all things, lent the same capacity for the immense and the intricate. Juno privately suspected that he’d been recommended as the sire so that maybe his brilliance could be paired with her fire (and brilliance, but that was just a general goal). If that was what he wanted for the child, it came as a surprise. He held the newborn very tenderly, as if afraid of breaking his spindly, shriveled little limbs — as if holding a sculpture made of glass. That was more typical of Juno’s impression of Sei. “Otherwise, we’ve done the poor boy no favors at all.”

“Oh, I’m sure we can find a promising future for him anyway; the Agricultural Biology department can probably find a use for a baby heron,” Juno Zeta had replied cheerfully. That was perhaps the best summary of the baby: her genes and his supplied all the ingredients to produce a naked little baby bird, beaky and long and fragile-looking.  

Except, when he got around to opening them, the eyes.

“They’re so light!” Cooed one of the attending flesh magicians. “How beautiful!”

They were, though Zeta was not sure she had an eye for beauty. The color was in broad strokes hers, in that they were gray, but her eyes were a dark gray with a mineral quality; the color of a smooth piece of stone. Scholar Sei’s eyes were blue — that was another reason for the pairing, the difference in phenotype. But the child’s eyes were so pale a gray as to be very nearly white, the darkness of the iris’ edges subtle and seamless, giving the eyes the silvery refraction of light through the surface of water.

“What an interesting kid,” said Sei, his voice touched with sentiment. It was for the best that he was more in charge of parenting. She had been content to sign the forms, do a quick donation, and check in periodically. “I wonder if he’ll keep the shade when he’s older, once the melanin settles.”

“It’s eyes, Scholar,” said Zeta. “I’ll want to see a little more out of Sextus before I’d call him interesting to anything but an ornithologist.”

“So, we’re committing to that one, are we?” He asked without looking up. They’d debated a bit about the name. Palamedes had been the easy part, taking a particle from Lykomedes. Juno had a soft spot for the root ‘Sex’; her mentor had been very intent on the Sex Study, and still was determined to wrest it from Marigold Shasta before she retired, and so it had gone ringing through Zeta’s early career.

“I’ve yet to see a superior contender, unless you’ve got one stored away somewhere.”

“…I always liked Shash.”

“I said ‘superior.’ Shash is just stealing from your grandmother. Directly borrowing is just laziness, not a real decision at all. It’s practically plagiarism. If you’d done anything with it, maybe, but as it stands, I’d still push for this one.” Still, she hoped the nod would act as a bit of a benediction: Sex had been marvelous, after all, and the inheritance that passed from mentor to student, advisor to advisee, felt truer to Juno Zeta than the one between parent and child.

“…Point taken. Well, what do you think of that, Palamedes Sextus?”

Palamedes Sextus’ unfocused gray eyes blearily wandered the room. His mouth widened slightly, which Juno was already dreading for people getting saccharine about it. She had to admit, it did help on the charm offensive.

“I guess he likes it, so you win.” Sei granted, swaying the newly-named child in his arms.

“Don’t be silly, his facial expressions won’t mean anything for months. But, if over-attribution of feeling helps you see sense, I bow to it in this instance.”

And that had been more or less the end of her opinions on the baby for a while. It was a month or two before Sei sent her a note requesting she spend a little time with the baby — that she couldn’t start acknowledging his existence only when he did something interesting, that wouldn’t be good for his sense of security. She thought he was secure enough with his father and the Nursery aides, but Lykomedes still recommended it.  So she Spent Time — an hour or two, here and there. It was more or less a thing she did with one arm full of an infant and the other full of something considerably more productive. She was never going to be one of those people who got teary-eyed about genetic offspring, and no one was really surprised about this.

It was on one such evening, in which she was to spend a few hours with Sextus in the interest of his health and development, that she properly reconsidered her mode of conversational modeling. She was aware of the purpose of talking to a baby — it was to begin teaching him communication by way of having conversations, silly and one-sided things, often done in a higher-pitched voice that was more attention-grabbing to an infant. This would show him language and its function.

“Well, I think I am a little tired of talking to you about num-nums, Palamedes,” she said, waving a stack of papers in the general direction of the 6-month old. “So, I’m going to show you the things I need to communicate about. Like these recent acquisitions and what they tell us about the Fourth House in the ninety-ninth century. Sounds good, Sextus?”

Sextus obligingly babbled, which he was doing more and more often lately. He was playing with a favorite toy that Lykomedes had brought, a series of blocks of different shapes, which came paired with a box with differently-shaped holes. He went and mashed the polymer square into the square hole.

“I will assume a yes. We received this collection courtesy of the estate of Captain Elizabeth Quatrain, 9832 to 9876. They include personal effects, medals, news clippings, and keepsakes. Do you know which of those is the most interesting to us?” She looked up into the big, disarming eyes of the baby, pausing for what seemed like an appropriate length.

“Bwah!” he answered. And then he put the rectangle shape into the square hole.

“Good guess!” She announced. “It’s the clippings. While we have all the large-scale publications on archive from that period, many more local ones provide unique perspectives, and may also have information that’s unique to the area. Captain Quatrain moved around a good deal, since she was actively in the cohort for much of her thirty-year career. Do you know how long thirty years is for a Fourth House enlisted officer?”

Palamedes looked at the little triangle and stuck a corner in his mouth to teethe on it.

“It’s still actually only thirty years, but thirty can be a big number of years if you’re Fourth. Time — history, Sextus — is often best perceived relativistically.” She began to pace, waving her papers in front of her; she was getting excited, navigating back and forth across her study. “While a lot of people take that way too far in popular perception, it’s very useful when understanding non-material things, such as cultural trends and understandings. Thirty years is a long time for the career of a Fourth House officer, because of the churn; for a Seventh House necromancer, fifty years is a lifetime; for a Ninth House friar, if it’s less than a hundred, it’s meaninglessly new, a flash in the pan. Here, thirty years would barely get something out of committee, even if every single participant was replaced by a successor. Honestly, that would make it worse.” 

Palamedes looked up from his toy and watched her traverse the space her living quarters provided as if she were racing the thoughts.

"I'm getting ahead of myself, of course; this isn't the time for a paper on the relative cultural scales of Houses, though there's something in that idea as applied to the Third House, who don't seem to want to continue any ideas they've had for longer than a year, tops." She made a quick note of that with a pen, pausing while Sextus dropped the sticky triangle into the square hole with a satisfying thud.

"My point is, it might be best to consider these clippings, the ones native to the Fourth House, as two or three generations' worth of societal influences. The extramural ones are better understood as a single-generation, but nevertheless at moments of considerable importance, don't you think?" she asked, as if to a colleague — and, like a colleague she didn't much trust, she did not let his little grabby hands actually near the sheets of flimsy, but she did crouch down to let him look at them. He stared at them and squinted, tilting his head like he was seriously considering the photographs. Which she thought was polite of him; she'd talked to scholars who were less polite about looking up from their own tasks.

"Gwama," was his measured opinion. When she stood back up, not sure what she'd been expecting, he — with a great and considered air of care, and a careful turning of the shape, slid the arched semicircle into the square hole. His pale eyes glanced up at her expectantly, an eager and very real smile on his face, one he held while waiting for her response.

The little hellion had been doing it to annoy someone. She burst into laughter instead, and for a moment he stared at her wonderingly, mouth open in surprise at what was clearly not the intended response to this little trick of his.

"Good point, Sextus. If it fits into the hole, that's where it should go! These need to be surveyed with both conceptualizations in mind!" When she laughed again, getting down to his level on the floor, he laughed along with her, high-pitched giggles ringing throughout the archivist's space.

She got some very good papers done that way, over the next few months, and was in annual review very satisfied with her output that year.

Palamedes Sextus in his second year was mostly on developmental track, and ahead in some regards. But he was not ahead in walking — a thing he commented on himself, when the pediatric care specialist had done a check-up on him. Juno received the report that the 20-month old had told the doctor, very solemnly, “I am very frustrated that I can’t get the hang of walking yet.” Just like that. Which was typical.

For another example, take the day a few months later when Zeta had observation duty for a while and had taken little Sextus to one of her favorite supplementary dining spots to get them both something uncommonly nice. This one was less high-traffic than the main dining hall, and the proprietor contrived to fill the space with herbaceous plants in vertical farming arrangements. The lights that fed these plants filtered through their leaves, leaving the dining room secluded even from light.

The planters had interested the kid, who had toddled — he finally had gotten the hang of it, thank God — over to examine the ones within his reach. Which left the snack they’d gotten unattended, but this was also typical. She set down her coffee to join him.

She crouched alongside Palamedes, looking up at the plants alongside him. From below, the leaves of a mint were translucent, lit yellow-green, with their veins dark rivers along their underside. The stems were clearer from below, which rendered a blossoming rosemary into nearly a tree. Next to her, the trailing end of the bow that closed a child’s outer robe — in which a small toddler was rendered a swooshing puff of fabric — fell out of Palamedes’ mouth as it went slack. He reached out a rounded little hand, arm emerging from the loose folds of fabric.

“Sextus, you can touch, but you shouldn’t interfere with their cultivation. They’re not yours, so don’t pick them,” Zeta cautioned.

“I won’t,” he lied without turning his head. She pointed to the rosemary, with its needles and frilly, tiny flowers, to guide his attention.

“See this one? It’s blooming right now. These little purple things are flowers the plant uses to reproduce. Or, it would, of course, except there’s nothing to carry the pollen, and nowhere to carry it to — and they usually cultivate it via cuttings anyway — so the display is largely ornamental.”

“What’s orna-ornamental?” he asked, rolling the strange words around in his mouth.

“That means they don’t have a productive job. They make the space look nicer, but we don’t make them useful. This cafeteria uses the leaves for their scent and flavor, in the food. In some places, plants are used for messages, like ‘congratulations,’ or ‘I love you.’ Rosemary’s said to represent remembrance on the Seventh, and I always like that one — because smells are good for helping you recall things, they’re a fantastic hook that the brain can use to catch onto the right memory,” she chattered brightly to this receptive audience, meandering as ideas arose and fell across her inner vision. She loved those little hooks of memory — her domain, to make paths for the past to come alive through, and then, to lay to sleep again.

Palamedes nodded solemnly and turned his attention to the plants again. He had reached out for a plant a tier lower and rubbed the glossy leaf between forefinger and thumb. He didn’t glance over at her, so it looked like he was saying to the plant, “Archivist! This plant smells like a toothbrush.”

“It’s mint, Palamedes. The smell and flavor’s often used for toothpaste, since it’s very refreshing.” 

He seemed to consider that, giving the plant an extra sniff before he asked, “Does it taste cold? Toothpaste tastes cold.”

“Yes, actually, it does.”

“Why?” Which opened the Maw. It could go on forever, or, even more complicated, he might start the "why" loop, and then go quiet and distracted for a time, and just when you thought you were clear of it, he’d resume and expect you to have kept enough track of his questions to remember what he was asking about. This drove the nursery staff slightly batty.

“It produces a chemical called Menthol, which tricks your brain by making it think the protein that your nerves use to tell you you’re cold is active.”  There was a trick to defusing it, and it was a trick Zeta quite respected: just be honest about it. “And I’m afraid I don’t know why the mint does this, you will have to consult an expert, or a book, or you will have to do some independent research, Sextus. But not by picking it, if you’ll recall.”

Sextus’s brows knitted into the perfect picture of a two-year-old’s stubborn determination to unravel the world. Now, she could turn her head for a minute and go back to get her coffee while he conducted his independent study of the mint (which she now kind of wanted him to pick, if only because she’d said not to do it twice already).

She retreated to their table and collected her coffee cup. While she had drunk about a million cups of coffee cold, if not intentionally, the coffee here was actually good: she had learned how to do her office coffee this way a few years ago but had never implemented those changes. It was difficult to take the time for good coffee. Juno paused over the baked dessert she had gotten for Palamedes, wondering if she should take it over or wrap it up for later.

“You shouldn’t eat that. It’s bad for your cholesterol,” came Palamedes’ voice to interrupt the train of thought. Juno turned to see that he’d wandered up to a patron who was enjoying something that would not have been available in the main dining hall. It swam in a butter-and-cheese sauce that, well, probably would be very bad for your cholesterol. It had probably cost the Agricultural Biology department’s goats a good bit of time, or was made from imported substances, which was wild to contemplate.

“And what do you know about cholesterol, kid?”

“It’s bad for your heart, because it clogs up your blood vessels.” The kid’s whole face lit up at the glory of being asked a question , and, furthermore, one for which he had been prepared – and the radiance of his eyes, widened out of their usual squint and into big round balls, made his stare into starlight.

“…Well. I. You should be with your parents!” The man sputtered, ears growing ruddy at the tips.

“How can I be in two places?” Palamedes asked, without quite catching onto the man’s unease. When he went to stand on his tip-toes, his balance was not remotely up for it – he half-fell against the man’s chair instead. Undaunted and undistracted, he asked, in something of a secretive whisper. “Mister, are you… an expert?”

“Then pick one! Whoever’s closer!” But the Mister, who probably was an expert in something, looked up and saw Juno Zeta with her coffee cup in her hands, and he saw the suppressed smile on her face.  She hadn’t wanted to disrupt the performance. Her mouth made a noise like snrk through her teeth. The man’s hand reached down, probably intending to nudge the boy off of his shin and in her direction. He pushed harder than that and sent Palamedes toppling back like a piece of flimsy under a fan. Palamedes dropped the leaf of mint he’d been holding in one hand, because of course he had picked it.

“No pushing!” Palamedes shouted without rising, indignant at having to school this adult. The adult did not let himself be schooled but stood up, bent down, and picked up the toddler under the armpits. “I don’t like being touched like this!” Palamedes shouted in one big rush, like saying it faster would have the rules be obeyed faster, as he tried to squirm out of reach.

“Lady, if this kid’s yours, you need to —”

“I don’t want it! No means no!” Palamedes wailed impotently, clearly repeating the things the nursery staff told him to say if he was being, for example, kidnapped or molested. In fairness, that meant the show needed to be over, pronto. Juno Zeta set down her cup with a hurried clatter. Palamedes shut his eyes very tight, still crying out, “That means you gotta stop ! Stop!”

On that last word, the air around him buzzed. It shimmered like he was a gas burner, turned on but not yet lit. The man’s hands went red – first the angry red of a burn, but then dots of blood oozing out as the skin split. He swore — Palamedes dropped like a stone — the hands were a blur, pulling back, unharmed — and Juno dove with her arms outstretched.

The impact of landing bottom-first knocked him out of a protective curve. Time glued itself back together as his mother skidded and upper body before they could hit the floor. The boy wailed like an alarm without pause or even opening his eyes — but then, the plex lenses of his glasses had been smudged all over with blood sweat already, blood with tears streaking through it, smearing his whole face.

“Shh, shh, I’ve got you, you’re ok.” Her mind was scattering for anything to say to get him to stop, and she hoped it was not a lie. Tiny fists and feet flailed in all directions as she tried to draw him in. In her distraction, she reached for what usually worked for researchers in similar degrees of distress. “You did well, Palamedes, very informative. You’ll show those fools, you’ll show them all.” Normally this was accompanied by the assurance that you weren’t laughing, and, yes, they would all see who was laughing when they unveiled their study on whatever. Just, you know, validating what they were saying in a soothing tone, which Zeta had never gotten down pat.

“Oh shit,” said the man, whose eyes were wide as saucers. He bent down over them. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to — I didn’t think — Oh shit.”

“Don’t start, or you’ll get him saying it again,” Juno said. Kid picked up just about anything you said in his range. But he was still bawling, big, unhinged sobs that made anything he might have been trying to say into a string of inarticulate noises that sounded like abwauh-haaaubaa, broken up intermittently with swallowed syllables. She didn’t think he’d broken anything, pending a thorough looking-over; he seemed more shocked and scared than hurt. Juno removed his glasses, letting the elastic cord that secured them hang loosely around his neck. She didn’t have a handkerchief with her, so she had to make use of the sleeve of her robe, carefully wiping snot and blood off his face.

“I’m so sorry,” the man repeated. “My hands moved before I could — I didn’t expect a thanergy barrier —"

“No, why would you? He’s only 28 months! But I think your being here is upsetting him,” Juno Zeta said, bright and brittle as ice. It felt like an insect, some buzzing pollinator, had been stashed into her limbs. A swarm of them — each set of wings vibrating in her blood with a different emotion. “Shoo! Go on, get!” The robe sleeve smeared with blood flapped to shoo him away. She could be about to end this man’s whole career later. She had more important things to deal with.

 Oh, it had been full of holes, wobbly and half-formed — and also, clearly way too much for him, but — it was beyond any doubt. He was a necromancer, just a third of the way past his second birthday, and one whose first act of necromancy was interesting.

“Brilliantly done by the standards of your age, Sextus,” Zeta said soothingly.

Most toddlers found aptitude somewhere in the range of 3-5, and with things more concrete than spirit magic — whatever their later specialties and aptitudes. The Sixth’s bell curve leaned towards the younger side in general. It was starting them on the theoretical underpinnings early. Neither his age nor reaching for spirit magic first were unheard of, or even both at once. She’d heard something like that about the current heir to the Fifth House — a charming girl. But it showed a certain abstract thinking in extremis: it was easy to instruct a child to manipulate a bone or muscle, something they could see and touch. Spirit relied on ideas — on souls — on the River, so far away that it was under your fingernails. There was something interesting to be had here, about the assumptions underlying how and why a child first showed necromantic aptitude, and — and Sextus was still crying, now more sniffling than sobs.

“No need to be upset, it’s alright. It’s OK, nothing’s broken.” She jostled him — hopefully gently. Maybe she should try bilateral nerve stimulation, though she was not sure what he’d make of that. Before she could embark on experiments, he blearily opened one gray eye. He hiccuped pathetically; his chest heaved with the effort of finding words.

“’m…no…bble?” The murmur was broken up by those little shuddering gasps for air.

“Use full words, Sextus. You’re upset, but that’s not an excuse.” It admittedly had been earlier.

“…I’m not in trouble?” he mumbled, low and shaky. His blood-streaked head drooped before another hiccup brought him sharply back up.

“Why, whatever for? I did tell you it was good work for your age. Very informative! I will need to share a few thoughts about pedagogy with your minders at the nursery.” In the next few hours she would, but they would immediately tell her that, no, you could not frighten small children into exposing necromancy early. Because that would upset them, but it wasn’t like upsetting children was something that never happened. Though, from the standpoint of behaviorism, maybe it would be a bad association. Fair enough. 

“…I hurt him,” said Palamedes, at that moment in time. He looked up through bloody lashes at her, his face knotting around several feelings — a pinched exhaustion winning out.

“No, you didn’t. It might have done him harm if he’d kept touching your barrier, but people usually heal up from that sort of grazing right away. Like when you bang yourself on something, but it’s not severe enough to bruise — it hurts, but it stops, doesn’t it? You didn’t really hurt him, Palamedes, so you’re not in trouble about that.” Palamedes sagged against her side in relief, his breaths growing slowly more even and deep. Which would be a problem — she’d need to keep him awake long enough to get him to the nursery. He was still sweating blood — now that he was crying less, the tracks that slid down his face were darker. She crumbled off a small piece of the desert and passed it through his lips. He mildly took a few crumbs and looked a little better for it. “What were you trying to do, subjectively?”

Like its weight was at the raw edge of his ability, his head lifted from her side.

“…I wanted him to stop. So I… Took energy. To be skin. For me. Like… Like the way they color the skeletons on the screens all-over orange. And that makes them safe?” He sounded very uncertain about that, stumbling to find out of his set of words — a broad (for his age) but random selection — the ones that would tell her what he meant. He made one last little sad, distressed hiccup. And, almost resigned, he let his eyelids flutter shut. And then he said, in slightly prissy tones of recitation, “…’m sorry. You’ll have to… consult an expert.”

“I’ll wait a few years for you to tell me yourself, then. Assuming you’ll remember this, anyway,” she told him lightly. His head came back to rest against her, and the little necromancer was — within a single turn of corridor — fast asleep.

The young necromancer was not thrilled when she woke him up periodically on the way, but that was just too bad; it was important to keep checking on him. The nursery staff were also not thrilled that she had returned him with his clothes and hair bloody, and Lykomedes would send her the laundry bill for that one, along with a note explaining he was not mad at her for the scare-them-necromantic idea, just disappointed. But they were considerably more pleased about the necromancy.

Chapter Text

Juno Zeta had serious work to do, and her career to advance. Her dear tutor had passed, which left the Archives department in a bit of a mess: Zeta knew the former Master Archivist’s system better than anyone, but she was still a few years off from having the sort of seniority for her to take the chair, so the new Master Archivist was in rather a bad spot. She was struggling to get enough authority as a result, which meant they had to re-catalogue the last year and a half’s work according to a new system. Juno Zeta had already sorted out how to improve the efficiency of it in the span of a week, which meant a new new system, and when she’d begun to make suggestions about that , three people tried to simultaneously clamp their hands over her mouth. Including the Master Archivist. So she was writing a spite paper about it that she intended to present at the earliest opportunity.

Master Scholar Marigold Shasta died, too, and that meant she needed to be keeping an eye on the Sex Study again. The arrangements Shasta had made to hold onto it were labyrinthine even by Sixth standards, and some of them did not end at her death. Which was a nuisance, and as a result, her vigilance would be glacial.

As a result, she honestly had not looked up from her own work and office politics until it was time for Sextus’ first advisory consultation. He was now about 4, and had entered into his introductory education, and having nearly completed his first unit, it was time to prepare his second one, and this required a discussion between his parents and his homeroom teacher.  Which led to her and Lykomedes Sei, who seemed to be doing well for himself, sitting in a cramped office decorated with a collection of children’s drawings and other interesting little relics.

“Well, Palamedes is certainly a bright boy,” said the teacher, Professor Sextant, in the way one might prepare to inform someone of a fatal illness, “If only he would learn to apply himself.”

“Oh, dear,” Lykomedes muttered, which was, as far as reactions to that news went, unusually muted. Sextant’s eyes darted over to Zeta, who was smiling.

“I heard that one a lot myself for a while,” she admitted. Sextant’s shoulders dropped in a sort of quiet relief.

“How is he doing now, then? Is there anything we can do to help him acclimate better?” Scholar Sei asked, without an edge of condemnation in it. His folded hands fretted back and forth with each other.

“Is he more inattentive to the material, or are his struggles in performance? How many children under your care currently have that issue?” Zeta followed up quickly, the two of them beginning a quick flurry of queries. The teacher chuckled.

“Not an entirely sound question, Archivist; as you yourself observed, there’s many different ways a student might not be engaging well with work, so I don’t intend to do comparisons.” Professor Sextant held up his hands in the universal ‘easy now’ gestures. “He does reasonably well, and for a less bright young necromancer, I wouldn’t be concerned; he won’t struggle to pass. But I do think that, given the right motivation, he could do better.”

Sextant handed them Palamedes’ marks; exam scores were solid across the board. Assignments were a bit more scattershot, with some very high and some significantly lower. Not awful, but the comparison made his overall profile spiky.

“It’s hard for me to tell precisely where the disconnect is, but the basic point is that he seems to be a little bit bored. It might be a question of the material not grabbing his interest to pay attention to the lessons, or it might be a matter of him not being engaged enough to consider it worth performing what he does know.”

“For me, it was the latter. At least until I found my topic, at which point I was off like a shot!” Juno said, without a great degree of concern. She’d mostly spent her time being bored on reading ahead in the textbook, until she’d run out of textbook.

“He has been rather…Frustrated, lately.” Lykomedes pondered this for a while. Juno Zeta could not comment.

“In the meanwhile, my suggestions would be to select classes that steer him away from the more stiff-necked teachers, who’d be more inclined to harshly penalize his behavior, and to keep a variety of subjects in front of him. For your parts, external motivations for assignments might help, and I’d recommend introducing him to lots of interesting things, and see if we can’t find something that will light the spark in him.”

Later, as they were leaving, she noticed that Lykomedes still looked very pensive, his eyebrows huddling together as if in a deep conference with the rest of his face. Perhaps more than pensive, though, he looked worried.

“If you have any other thoughts, share them with the rest of the class, Sei.” Juno eventually couldn’t help but poke at it. Lykomedes gave a thin smile in return.

“I think some of this is about…the other children,” he eventually said. He clasped his hands behind his back. “I think it’s become discouraging for him, not getting along well with them.”

“How so? What do they have to do with it?” This provoked a dry little chuckle.

“I think he’s trying to find a way of presenting himself that makes them happy with him. He told me the other day that he was frustrated. He said that when he gets an answer right, they get mad — and tell him that another of the children was just about to say it — even if they never do. And if he pretends to get an answer wrong, they mock him worse for it.” 

“Oh, so they’re jealous. Well, that’s a bastard, right there. He shouldn’t fold to them like that.” Juno could remember other kids getting mad at her – she could not remember ever thinking that she should do anything to stop them.

“Poor kids,” he sighed, “They start tangling themselves up this way so young. I’ve asked him not to lie for them, and to be patient, when he can. He can’t change them.”

“Do you think that would work?” 

“I think it’s very hard for him.” Which was not an answer. “If there’s something that can carry all of him, without pinning him down or holding him back — something that can make a home for him, with open arms — that will be the thing that lights him up. All we can do is encourage him and hope.”

Juno made a note to herself to find him something — maybe little ways he could help with her work. Things she could teach him. This was more her mold, than helping him with other juvenile mess factories — and because, she found, she wanted to see it. What Palamedes Sextus shining looked like.

Palamedes Sextus did not make it quite that easy, because when something did light a fire in him, it was not a subject; it was a person. And Zeta did not immediately know it from him, or even from the results. She first heard about it one afternoon in the archives.

One of the main roles of the Archivists were to navigate books, documents, and objects back and forth between the main stacks and displays and the archives, the great repository of knowledge; she thought of it as being the hippocampus of the Library, converting the working memory into long-term memory. In a fit of whimsy, she’d put a poster of a brain up in her personal office, drawn an arrow pointing to the hippocampus, and written YOU ARE HERE. At least one person called it a little juvenile, but she’d pointed out the value of play for the brain’s over-all function, so they could shove it.

That day, they’d gone a-hunting for some things for an exhibition — Archeo had gotten some absolutely exquisite Third House garments circa the 85th century that they intended to display, and this meant it was time to get some supplementary material from the archives. So the tables in the main archival office were covered in the boxes and boxes of storage files containing paintings, lithographs, magazines, and video files of the Third House from that period — this was when there’d been a trend for vid-files of everything. Juno Zeta and her favorite cousin (of an extremely wide field, but only one of her first cousins worked with her in the Archives, so he was by default her favorite) Archivist Metabus Seibert were sorting out what was relevant, usable, and safe to display publicly. The things that would be damaged by public viewing, but would still have value, they’d make copies of to display. They had the big projector out and were playing different video files while they worked, so the office was unusually noisy with the chatter of long-dead Third House Fashionistas as they spoke about who they were wearing — In some cases more literally than others.

“Oh, pause it, pause it! There!” Zeta slapped the top of the desk like spurring an animal. She’d spotted something amid the glitter. “There, in the background — go back a few frames so you can see it more clearly! Behind the main speaker,” She jabbed a finger at one figure wearing a dress whose skirt had a layer of overlapping feathers decorating it, worn beneath a robe of feathers. “That looks exactly like Accession Number 9985.422.721.a, the 8429 dress, once you allow for the degradation of the feathers!”

Metabus obligingly rewound by a handful of frames, where the pattern under the feathers in the dress was in view. He also took a moment to look at the catalog Archeo had sent over to compare, since only Zeta had memorized the accession numbers. 

“…It’s definitely the same print of fabric and cut of dress. I don’t know if this will delight the Archeology team or make them scream in agony for those lost feathers.”

 “I’d be delighted if I were them, and they’ll owe me a favor for spotting this! They could try a reconstruction alongside the preservation; it’s what I would do in their shoes. At the very least, we’ll send them the file and timestamp. Let’s see if that file has any further views of the dress.”

He noted down the timestamp and began to play the video again, paying considerably more attention now. The lights from the viewscreen lit up Metabus’ dark brown hair as he set down his pen and clipboard again.

“By the way.” Metabus cleared his throat. “If you see Palamedes Sextus before I do, could you pass along my thanks?”

“Certainly, but what do you owe a five-year-old?” she quizzically lifted an eyebrow and a corner of her mouth. 

“It’s about Camilla,” explained Metabus without sheepishness; he was not much for smiling, but there was a certain openness to his posture, a shininess like he’d gone and polished himself for display. “She’s mentioned him a full seven times in the past two weeks.”

That got both her eyebrows standing to attention. She’d followed Camilla Hect’s development with some interest, because Metabus and his husband Nestor, a frequent visitor as part of Metabus’ team, were prone to fretting about her. They were very family-oriented people.

“That’s quite a lot of mentions! What’s she got to say about the boy?”

“That she met him; that he can’t climb anything; how to make him her friend. Camilla wanted to know how to make a friend,” Metabus repeated for emphasis – and he did smile then, his shoulders settling like a great weight had been taken off.

“What did you tell her?”

“That she should just ask him, given that she likes spending time with him. From there, it’s all ‘Palamedes said’ this, ‘Can I show Palamedes’ that. He helped her with a grammar assignment. She’s talking more in general, now that she has someone she wants to talk to outside the family.” He seemed entirely unaware that he’d missed the surprising part.

“Palamedes Sextus helped her with an assignment? You’re sure about that?”

“Yes; why?”

“He barely does his own assignments! If he helped her, then he might have done his, and that probably qualifies as a miracle.” Her eyes sparkled despite the frustration, and she had to admit that she felt her own bright and polished feeling. “I maybe ought to thank Camilla, rather than the reverse. Though, really, I’m not sure it’s something anyone ought to thank anyone for. If that boy wants to be her friend, it’s because he wants it, you know.” 

“You have a point. My regards, then.”

The later section of the video file contained an interview with the wearer of the dress, which was an absolute goldmine. Archeology was going to have to stamp her forms in supplication.

The remarkable shift seemed to have continued, and she saw it herself on her next visit. That day, she’d told Palamedes to come with her for a pick-up. Nothing fancy, just a few boxes of periodicals that were going out of the stacks and into archives and needed to be scanned; the sort of thing that normally got foisted onto a more junior team member, or someone from collections. But it was a great chance for a ‘take your kid to work’ day.

When she went to their agreed meeting spot, he was showing the contents of a book to a little girl with her hair in two dark braids. He closed it in a hurry when he heard the sound of Juno’s footsteps. The girl had shifted as well, clustering close to his back — she did not look at the archivist directly.

“Hello, Archivist!” he said brightly. He turned his head towards the shadowy girl. “Camilla, this is my mum, Archivist Juno Zeta. Archivist, this is my friend Camilla Hect.”

His friend Camilla Hect did not say hello, but nodded her head respectfully before trying to merge herself into Palamedes’ shadow — but that was inherently doomed, because she was bigger than he was in all respects; a sturdy girl and a few months his senior, besides. She shifted her weight to her other foot, swaying a bit of her face out from behind him; for a split second, Zeta met her eyes, which were big and dark, ambiguously shaded — they might have been the color of cool soil; they might have been the color of warm stone.

“A pleasure, Camilla. Your fathers have told me a lot about you. I hope Sextus isn’t pestering you too much.”

“No.” Camilla answered, her voice very quiet — not meek-sounding, but like it was having to be located somewhere inside her chest before she used it. “…It’s fun.”

“Mum,” said Palamedes — and that startled Juno. “Can Camilla come with us? We won’t get in trouble. We’ll be quiet, I promise! Camilla’s the best at being quiet.”

“Could give you lessons, huh?”

“I don’t think so, sadly,” he admitted while looking down, like he’d like to learn but had recognized a gap in talent. “But that’s alright, since I can talk when it’s hard for her, so that’s fair. And if you need to get something high up, Camilla could climb up for it. She’s amazing at climbing!” He presented it with all the pride of a perfectly-completed final. Camilla ducked her head demurely, but smiled, quick and fleeting as a shadow cast by water.

“We have ladders for that, Sextus,” Juno pointed out, which did nothing to deflate Palamedes’ high spirits. “Besides which, we won’t need anything that the Circulation Department isn’t fully prepared to give us.”

“I guess that’s true this time. May she come anyway?” They both looked at her very intently; neither were terribly good at cute puppy-dog eyes — too intense, and unpracticed at attempting appeal in a way that left their expressions rigid with hope.

“I suppose there’s no harm in it,” she decided, because her reflexive smile had already given up pretending to be stern. She wanted to see how it would play out, anyway.

“Yes!” Palamedes hissed in triumph. Camilla quietly pumped a fist.

“OK, off we go, then,” said Zeta, leaving the two kids to follow in her wake on the way to the circulation desks. Palamedes was behind her at first, but his stamina for a power walk was not unlimited, and Camilla had quick strides, so she eventually was between the two of them.

“You’ve both mentioned each other’s climbing skill, or lack thereof,” Zeta observed as she turned a corridor. They were entering the more public corridors, rather than the smaller, less high-traffic side ones. People were dotting in it, talking quietly or busily managing their affairs, hovering in doorways or walking along in gray clusters. “I work with your dads, Camilla, and they mentioned it. Is there a story there?”

“…Palamedes got lost at Swordsman’s Spire,” Camilla answered, with a tiny knife’s edge of teasing in it.

“I did not!” he blustered indignantly. “I knew where I was going! Just…not how to get there.”

“And where were you going?” Juno interjected.

“As high up as I could,” he answered, but it was only half an answer. The spire was, authentically, a spire — even when viewed from outside the station. Aside from hosting the Sixth’s martial and athletic training centers, its aperture held aloft their communications antennae and several essential devices for measuring solar winds, temperature, and other ambient features of living so close to Dominicus; while it represented a rather difficult challenge in terms of the insulation it required, it also provided a key defense in terms of early detection. The main training center took some advantage of the spire’s structure to have vaulted ceilings of the sort only the Core had. Which explained the means of this goal of his, but not the reasons. Seeing her tilt a head back at him, he added for context. “Camilla started the story late.”

They’d arrived, however, so she held up a hand to halt the narrative.

“Hold that thought,” she said as they entered the Library’s Core. The grand main chamber extended upwards through six or seven layers of the installation, with rings of landings looking out over the main floor, and all the way around were the books. Shelves and shelves of books, scores of books; books that had to be chained to enormous reading stands, books with bone-inlaid spines, books that could be carried to the desks or clusters of chairs that dotted the spaces between aisles. Everyone in it moved with a hush, soft-shoeing across the space, so it blended into a susurrus, barely audible.

While the Sixth had little patience for beauty, here the effort had been made once and preserved with everything else. The central floor was decorated with a mosaic displaying a galaxy in mostly greyscale, its splash of white spiraling out beneath a thin silver replication of the Golden Ratio, in all its mathematical perfection. The space outside the galaxy extended to form a hexagon, with its points marked by Sixth House skulls and scrollwork designs for the outer border.

 The original tiles were, of course, long since removed and put in a climate-controlled glass box, which you could look at (the coloration was different stones rather than pigments). As were centuries of replacement tiles. But, as tiles were replaced, century by century, tile by tile, they were kept in their original order, their original structure.  Every so often, someone would try building a layer of plex above the tiles, so the originals could still be used, and the plex could be replaced instead. But somehow, generations of Scholars had felt there was something too far in that: that, if they could not keep the original tiles in the mosaic, they could at least give the mosaic its original relationship to its surroundings. This and the painstaking care of the replacements allowed them to still say that, for a specific value of “the mosaic” and a value of “been there,” the mosaic had been there since the house’s founding. Not all visitors understood this.

They walked over to one of the lower floor circulation desks, near the periodicals, where a bespectacled scholar was waiting with a small collection of boxes.

“Oh, Archivist Zeta,” they said, smiling and saying in a practiced hush — not whispery-sounding, but the place where projection went to die, “I didn’t expect you to pick these up personally.”

“I have assistants to help with the boxes, as a sort of educational effort or something like that, so I came down with them. Introductory Education students and Scholar students are often equally good for grunt work, and they’d both like a good nap.” She did not try to lower her volume — it never actually worked for more than a sentence. With a quick sweep of her hand that sent her robe-sleeve billowing, she gestured to her two assistants, who were young enough to be offended by needing a nap (unlike a real Scholar, who would be delighted). “I’ll sign off on receipt to show the archives have received the boxes, and the flimsy will copy my imprints down a layer under: one for me, and one for her,” she explained for the benefit of the kids, who had both subtly drooped at the news that this was not going to be a task that required the thumbspike. She took the clip-board with its forms in alternating white and lemon-yellow forms stacked on it, and leant back against the desk to write out signatures.

“So,” she added, “You may now release the thought while I sign; where does the story begin, Sextus?”

“A bird got loose from one of the Agricultural Biology labs.” Palamedes’ tone had a natural quiet that tended to happen growing up in the Library — at least it did when he was calm. He eyed the collection of pens in their pen stand with longing.

“And how did you find out about something happening all the way in the Agricultural Biology labs?” she asked as she switched to a different form. The unfortunate circulation desk attendant made a weak shushing noise that none of the three of them regarded — except maybe Camilla, who regarded it by nature. “It’s not quite the beginning without that.”

“I was just curious about the labs with the animal enclosures. But I didn’t get to see them, not at that time, since they were already upset about the bird.”  

With a flick of the pen, Juno signed the last form, flicking the whole stack into one cohesive unit again, before she began to separate the forms. One for her, one for the circulation desk, until she had a halved stack. She brought a roll of tape and two of the boxes to the kid’s reach. “Alright, you take this form, and Camilla, you that one, and tape it to this box and that one. That’ll keep them with the magazines they’re meant to go with.” They gave a pair of quick nods and set seriously to doing their work. Juno switched to adding a comment about the story unfolding. “They wouldn’t have let you in, anyway, I’m afraid to say. They’re very protective of their stock,” she informed Palamedes, with reluctance — the sort that said sorry, kid, I wish the world of adults was slightly different.

“They did, though! Eventually,” Palamedes said with the biggest and most triumphant grin of his life. “But that’s the end of the story. I wanted to find the bird. And I thought, since birds can fly, if it didn’t know where to go, it would go as high up as it could. And so the spire!”

“What sort of bird was this? While I’m aware their usual stock can fly, if their wings aren’t clipped,” which they sometimes were, for safety reasons — but most of the Agricultural Biology department’s stocks of birds were chickens, though those were not usually lab stock. “But most of them are not known for being high fliers. It wouldn’t be right to make assumptions about their capabilities based on the birds you read about in books. They’re usually different species.”

“I didn’t! It was a rock dove, they said. They were new. Is that important, Archivist?” He added, in a defensive rush, “I was right, in the end.” Which provoked a hurried little nod from Camilla to back him up.

“No, I’m just wondering.” She tapped the roll of tape against her own forms, thoughtfully — forgetting in her tapping to tape. “Why a rock dove?”

 “I don’t know, but that’s not the important part. The point was, the spire was the highest spot I could think of. And then…I…” and there he paused and looked over towards Camilla, who had a tiny, self-satisfied smile.

“Do you want me to finish for you?” she asked, leaning forward in an obliging way that made Palamedes groan.

“No, I’m fine.” He heaved the most enormous sigh a five-year-old had ever achieved. “I…had some difficulties with trying to find how to get to the highest chambers.” 

Camilla gave an insistent sort of ‘go on’ nod. Juno was still thinking, somewhere only halfway-attached to the story. Rock doves. They’re domesticated, but on the Third and Fourth, there are not insignificant feral populations. Is there something about that flexibility that they’re considering? Or is it the diversity of color and pattern? Or something else?

 “…I did, in fact, I guess, get a little lost.”

 “…I’m not accepting so simple an explanation!” Juno burst out of her thoughts with a snap which sent the paperwork flying to the desktop.

“Archivist, shhh!” cried out the poor occupier of the circulations desk at the same time Palamedes asked, “For me being lost? I told you, I knew where I was going , really!”

“No, not that! About the bird! I want to know why they’ve brought in new rock doves.” Her eyes were alight with possibility — just off the top of her head, there were their skeletal adaptations for flight or their fascinating capacity for long-distance navigation, which she was not sure Rock Doves exhibited, actually. Not that she’d ever been somewhere migrations were relevant. “I admit, animal biology is not exactly my forte — but that’s precisely why this has caught my interest, and I intend to lose no time.”

 She set off at a trot, laser-focused on the upper rings of shelves. She could go down to the labs, but the possibility of a mundane answer — that the specific species of bird was selected arbitrarily, or they were just easy to handle — had such little appeal.

From behind her, she heard Camilla’s rare voice calling, “But the boxes! You signed!”

“That won’t stop her,” came Palamedes’ quieter response. “She’s got that look, and that means she won’t stop until she’s done.”

 “So, like you?” Camilla’s voice, growing distant as Juno Zeta mounted the stairs to the next layer up, dropped further.

 She missed Palamedes’ response, only catching the tail end where he called out, breaking through the gentle murmur of the library on a busy workday, “Archivist! Wait up!”

Juno jigged from foot to foot to restrain herself until the two children reached the landing with their arms full of boxes. Then she was up, continuing through the double-helix of the stairs.

“Where are you going?” asked Palamedes, breathing heavily from behind a pair of boxes that blocked most of his face.

“Animal Biology’s on the third ring. I’d like to see what we’ve got there, and see if anything jumps out at me as an avenue of research!” She glanced at the kids, neither of whom could take their hands off of supporting the boxes; their weight wasn’t high, even for small children, but their volume proved cumbersome for them. Without another word, she swooped up the top box from each kid and carried one under each arm. Away she went, calling out breezily behind her, “Keep a hand on the guard rail, alright, and do try and keep up if you’re coming along — you’re allowed to wait, if you’d rather, of course.”

On the third ring, she made a beeline for the appropriately-numbered section: a tall cluster of shelves running the length of one wall bookcase and the several rows around it. She dumped the boxes of periodicals on the nearest table and began hunting for treasure among the shelves. Yes, there was a catalog, but serendipity searching was one of the great joys in life!

“I’ll start with Necromantia Animales; I’ve read it, but that was some time ago, and you can often view things from a new angle when you’re refreshing fundamentals, keep that in mind. They could be working on a new curriculum for using necromancy with animals, but I don’t think they’d need new birds for that.” She scooped up the particularly heavy tome from the shelf, enjoying the satisfactory feeling of its leather binding — real cow leather, in a deep mossy green.

“Does there need to be a special curriculum for that? What’s so difficult about animals?” The boy asked, setting his own box down and looking up at the wall of books with some anticipation of his own.

“They’re filthy and smelly, and they never do what you want,” Juno answered promptly. “Necromantically, though… It takes some getting used to. First, they lack the complexity of thalergy and thanergy sufficient to constitute a soul. There’s less to work with, and less potential space, and most necromancers aren’t really familiar with nonhuman anatomy enough to modify their theorems to work well.” She flipped open a book about birds in general, scanning over a few pages before deciding to add it to the budding pile. “It’s a different enough experience that a lot of necromancers, even ones given the chance, never get the hang of it — a mismatch, I guess you could say – now! I’d like something about domestication, and let’s see… The Pigeon, Wendell Trill. Seems a good introduction about the peculiarities of pigeons.“

Her eyes had fallen on a book likely intended for show birds, given the arithronym — but the author had a few others on the shelf, including an encyclopedia, so it wasn’t a complete vainglory project. This was nearly ideal, but its location wasn’t — it was quite a few feet above even her head — the top of one of the aisle bookshelves.

“Damn, I’m going to need to get one of the big ladders for this one. Well, alright. And — Palamedes, you can feel free to continue your story while we go, I apologize for interrupting.”

“Really?” Palamedes clutched the books he’d been picking up to his chest in delight.

“Really, I can multitask, and this is all for fun, anyway.” She set off down the aisle to get one of the wheeled ladders made to go along the bookshelves. Palamedes followed, continuing his story eagerly.

“Well, I was… a little lost. The stairs stop following the usual stairwell pattern, do you know why?”

“Haven’t the foggiest; I’ve never even been up there myself.”

“Hm. Well, luckily, I met Camilla, and she knew how to get there. Not ‘met,’ really; we have classes. But it’s hard for her to talk with so many people around and so much going on, so this was the first time we talked. I spotted the bird, but it had gotten up in the big supports for the ceiling and the lights.”

 “The rafters, you mean. This,” Juno pointed out without condemnation. With a grunt, she got the ladder moving back towards her quarry. “Is where most children would get an adult.”

“Yes, most children,” Palamedes agreed pleasantly, as if this were a distant and unrelated fact, like what the atmosphere of the Eighth was like — interesting, but only relevant to people billions of kilometers away. “Just like most adults wouldn’t be running after pigeon books when they had work to do.”

“Someone does take after me, I suppose.” As she passed her little assistant on the return trip, she reached over and ruffled his hair brusquely. She realized when he turned to head back that Camilla was no longer directly behind him.

“Thanks. I figured out that there were ways up there using the supports of the room, starting from the climbing bars, and then the power supports up to the rafters. I tried, but I couldn’t get up the climbing bars. So, I was thinking of how to do it when Camilla — would you like to tell this part, Camilla?”

He turned his gaze up toward the ceiling, and he waited.  Juno had never seen Palamedes wait for anything as patiently as he waited for Camilla to answer — looking at her without tension in his face, so that his gaze rested very lightly, and his eyebrows came out of their protective huddle. If he’d wanted to make an appealing face before, he’d have done better to look like this. His eyes had a soft, fluid radiance, like sunlight through old glass, that made the too-numerous bones of his face into something charmingly ethereal. 

On the other side of that gaze, Camilla Hect sat atop the bookshelf, idly kicking her legs. She held white flimsy-covered spine of The Pigeon in one hand and rested the other on top of the shelf. She looked down with the satisfied grace of a cat, and said simply, “No.” And, seeing the expression on Juno’s face: “I got the right book.”

“So you did! And fast, at that.”

“As you can see, Camilla was more than up to it!” Palamedes said with a sweep of a hand, like he was giving a presentation. “When Camilla told me ‘Tell me the how, and I’ll get it,” I explained my idea, and she was able to do it. She really is very smart, people just don’t understand,” he added in a defensive hurry that put Zeta in mind of Metabus, who often said the same thing about Camilla Hect and her struggling grades.

“I believe you. King Undying, I didn’t even hear you moving, Camilla! You didn’t kick any of the books on your way up, did you?” she asked, scanning the shelves that would have formed a likely path upwards for the girl. Not even a book out of place.

“No. I took off my shoes, just in case.” Camilla jabbed a finger down at a pair of abandoned children’s shoes at the base of the bookshelf.

“I begin to understand how you managed this plan of yours not ending with breaking all Camilla’s bones,” she had to concede. “In spite of all the room for disaster.”

“It was a very good plan!” Palamedes burst out, before settling back down, “But it did need someone as good at it as Camilla, I see that now. Once she got up onto the tops of the climbing bars, she made a quick hop to the power supports, and then climbed those to the top, where she could sort of scoot along there to the rafters, and up those to get to the bird! It was so cool!”

Camilla smiled, and though she’d not been slouching, she straightened her back with radiant satisfaction.

“Well done. But I notice the lack of exit strategy here, besides ‘do it in reverse, with a bird.’ I can at least say I’ve got one prepared for you with a book about a bird.” She wheeled the ladder into place beside Camilla’s section of shelf, and temporarily handed the armful of books to Palamedes. “You’ve got to plan a way beyond the next step when you’ve got assistants to look after — what if she’d have fallen when she was dealing with the bird?”

“I didn’t,” Camilla interrupted. She stared at Juno’s ascent up the ladder as if in anticipation of a hidden dagger. “I wanted to try.”

“She didn’t fall then, though,” Palamedes added, stubbornly — but there was just a flicker of unease in his face. “It pecked at her a little when she grabbed it, but she did stay on the supports until she down.”

“He fixed the pecks, with necromancy,” Camilla’s face flickered with a proud and slightly spiteful smile. She probably hadn’t intended it to be contagious, but Juno’s smile was less barbed. “They didn’t even hurt after.”

“I used anti-bac on them first, to make sure the wounds were clean. I checked the blood vessels first, so she wouldn’t bleed after the skin got fixed.” Palamedes presented from the base of the ladder, with a glowing satisfaction, like these were trade necromantic secrets. Which, for the trade as practiced by 5-year-olds, they were. She recalled what she had been learning at five: how blood vessels and skin were structured, and how to build or rebuild them — but that was not quite the same as ‘best practices for repairing a living human.’

“Well done!” Juno gave a nod to her two storytellers, one above and one below the ladder, and their matching bright smiles — Palamedes a fire-starter’s slow building of smoke before it burst into light, Camilla’s a spark flying.

“Yes, the animal biologists thought so,” Palamedes said very smugly. “And the bird wasn’t a bad bird, it was only scared. It was good once Camilla brought it down.”

“You have to hold it still,” Camilla told her, like this was the trade secret of birds. Speaking of trade secrets of birds, Juno grabbed another book from below the top two shelves — this was Trill’s Encyclopedia of Pigeon Breeds. The young girl added, as she leant over the edge to pass the archivist her book, “They even let us see the labs with the bird cages.”

“Oh! That could be very useful for this endeavor! Was there anything indicative of their projects?” Juno grabbed the offered book and made her way down the ladder, leaving the path clear for Camilla to shimmy down.

“There were birds, nesting-boxes, and bird-food. And toys they call enrichment. Sorry, Archivist,” Palamedes supplied.  

“I see. They’re being secretive, hm? Or I’m constructing a fake mystery to tilt at for the joy of having a puzzle to solve, which probably means I need more enrichment in my enclosure.” She pondered, forced to admit the shape of this activity. Of course, she hardly was the only one. Her eyes turned to Palamedes Sextus and the little girl who’d shimmied down the ladder after her. “Speaking of…I understand your plan produced the desired results, but Sextus: you cannot risk other people as freely as you’d get yourself in trouble, just because you had a great idea.”

Palamedes tilted his head — rather like a puzzled animal himself. But his arms betrayed unease again — they clutched the books she’d handed him like a shield over his heart.  Which she supposed was fair enough.

“You need to at least consider precautions,” the archivist insisted. “So I think it best to punish you a little. I expect to see a report about what to do if someone falls from a great height on my desk in a week’s time, alright, Sextus?”

Camilla bristled, leaning forward on her toes like she intended to lunge, though what she actually would do was harder to say. Juno elected to walk prosaically to the table with their things and did not give them a glance back.

“…That’s reasonable,” Palamedes said after a long pause. At something behind Juno’s back, he said, a little more firmly, “No, it is. I worried when the bird was having a tantrum that you’d fall or get hurt. I’d like to know.”

She did turn her head then; Camilla clustered next to Palamedes, one consoling hand on his shoulder. Palamedes’ head dipped without resistance.

“Don’t worry; I can’t imagine that’ll stop your next brilliant scheme, so you shouldn’t think I intend to. Now, come on, leave these here, and I’ll help you pick out some books on first aid for your report — it’s your turn to lead the research effort, Palamedes Sextus!” Juno added more brightly, which was the perfect thing to console the little adept into hurrying to the table.

When they turned to head to the ring with the curative sciences section — which meant, yes, quite forgetting about those periodicals for the time being, but who even cared about Better Bones and Gardens?  Palamedes paused after a step or two and turned his head. Camilla was anxiously glancing back at the boxes and books, which suggested that she might care about, if nothing else, finishing the first task. He shrugged, smiled, and quietly held out a hand to the balking girl. That was all it took for her to hold it, and only then was he able to continue.

Juno felt suddenly like she was a side character in one of those Seventh House children’s novels about a lonely but gentle child being the only one who could befriend some heedlessly noble creature, like a horse or a dog (the creature and/or child always died at the end of those). Then, she had to consider that she was not exactly sure which was which — if Camilla’s quiet had not caused the prickly boy to come to her, slowing down long enough to sniff an outstretched hand.

When they’d found a few basic books about bodies and first aid appropriate for children of Palamedes’ age — adjusting for what the Sixth House would consider appropriate for a necromancer of Palamedes’ age, which ruled out the books about boo-boos — and a few that he thought looked interesting that she saw no reason for him to be daunted by, Camilla scooped them all up into her arms for the return trip to their table.

Juno said “you don’t need to—" at the same time Palamedes said “I should—” And Camilla simply looked at them both with eyes like rock.

“You’re the only one who got an essay,” she said, simply. She walked away with her head held very high.

“I’m not in a position to assign work to you,” Juno pointed out as she scurried to keep up. “That’s for your dads to do.”

“They didn’t, though. The results are the results,” she said, in the exact tones Nestor would say it in. From this, Camilla refused to be budged, even when they got back to the table. She set the books down with a satisfied thud.

It was after they’d sat down and were looking through their requisitions that Juno returned to the topic. 

“You’re quite talented, Camilla. Do you intend to join the cohort when you’re older?”

This took a long time for Camilla to decide if she wanted to pull a word out of her depths, tilting her head to one side and then the other. Eventually, she shook her head.

“Oh? Whyever not?”

This was an even longer pause, one that clearly worried Camilla — her brows furrowed, and she looked seriously up at Juno Zeta, the gaze of someone expecting judgment for her silence.

“…I want to do something…helpful,” Camilla eventually drew out, choosing each word with a great precision, a squinching of her eyes and nose, which did not even ease when the expected judgment did not come.

“Just as an exercise in false advocacy: A cohort swordswoman helps out the cohort’s necromancers and each other.” Juno Zeta flicked over a page. It was surprising what had been done, what ornate and showy varieties and mutations had been achieved, from limited stock.

“Yes, but who are they helping?” Palamedes interrupted. “I know we get money. And genes. But that’s not really making something better by fighting.” Every so often, he looked up from his rapid-fire note-taking from the open book in front of him. When the time had come to sit down, he’d proudly flourished a hand-sized pad of flimsy and a small pencil from some of his pockets, and had been delighted about getting to use them.

Other people would have, then, told Palamedes not to say that, but Juno had no time for that sort of dancing around.

“I certainly never thought it’d be interesting, though I know one of your dads did when he was younger,” Juno told Camilla. This had gotten the Sixth house two new citizens, though one was sadly dead now — that had been Marceline Quadlin, who had borne a girl who was Camilla’s half-sister. Metabus had retired from the cohort after losing her. He had joined the Archives, remarried, and then, a few years later, Camilla had been born. She wondered what he’d think of his second-born’s assessment — and as far as she knew, Kiana was not interested in the cohort either. That made it curious indeed. “Well, good luck to you in whatever useful thing you find to do, Camilla Hect.”

Today, her idea of a useful thing — aside from carrying books, which was very useful — seemed to be listening. Every so often, Palamedes would summarize in a low whisper some of what he was reading, which served an organizational function by rehearsing the topic. Every so often, Camilla would gesture to indicate a passage for reasons only clear to Palamedes and herself — usually when she thought Juno was too absorbed in her own work to notice, so that what the archivist caught was a hand retreating, an eyebrow lowering.  

They stayed on task for quite some time, until another archivist came to see what had happened to their boxes, and to remind them all to go to their dinners; the kids went lightly, but Juno sighed to herself. She had some thoughts about the iridescence of pigeon feathers and potential application of iridescent keratin production that she nearly had a solid grasp of.

Then it turned out they had just been hoping that they could get their bird enclosure expansion past the Oversight Body, with the notion that maybe a dovecote would be a more efficient use of space than further chickens. Life was full of disappointments.

But the next week, there was a small report in her cubby, which really did show something was working there. It kept working: both of their grades shot up as Camilla began to speak more regularly. Despite what Camilla said, she continued to lean towards physical education, where she performed well, even without Palamedes being able to help aside from fixing up scrapes. Lykomedes even said fondly that he’d seen Palamedes “holding seminars” and study sessions for a collection of other kids, not just Camilla. Camilla was present more or less every time Juno saw him after that for the next eternity, until she came to think of Camilla as another student of hers as much as anyone else’s.

Archivist Juno Zeta made junior fellow, to her immeasurable satisfaction. She had a few new projects and acquisitions in the fire of the following years — in the year Palamedes turned eight, she was able to snatch a collection of manuscripts from the 97th century that occupied her time for more or less the entire summer — the marginalia! There were some Ninth House tomes in there, and those were always such a bitch to get a hold of.

So she missed the part where it turned out, Palamedes Sextus had not yet fully ignited. He had, prior to that year, not even gotten started.

It got her attention only when his second quarter units report came in, and she had the time to check that and his first quarter report, and he had about 6 more credit-hours in them than usual, six more grade points than she expected (supported by, in the first quarter, yes, another six additional hours), and he’d taken a First Circle Exam at the end and had blown it away. He had taken control over his studies by then, and his plate for the next module was stacked even higher. And stacked in a direction, at that. In addition to a load of psychometry and the usual range for a young necromancer, he’d also gotten a few extra courses in flesh magic, and a few curative science courses that were usually for teenagers. But, since he had passed that exam, he qualified.

 “…Well,” she said, turning the flimsy card over in her hands, ”It’s about time he got going.”      

She decided to go and see him about it — he’d moved, according to a note she’d gotten months ago, fully into the Juvie Dorms. She’d made sure to go in a time that probably could have been, for most students his age, time to sleep. It was the first hour he had without dinner, classes, chore duty, or more classes in the way, so a reasonable likelihood of him actually being in the vicinity.

“Archivist!” His voice called out from about a turn away. Camilla was flagging her down, running ahead of him — Palamedes was gasping for breath. When Camilla came to a stop, she turned aside to let him pass.

The face that nearly vanished under Camilla’s dark fringe was a suggestion, rendered blurry and neutral with the darkness under her eyes. The face that walked toward her was sharp as broken glass — and, while he’d never been short on facial bones before, it looked like he’d jammed in about six more, until they were crowding directly under his skin. What looked up at her, behind the glasses, were the shadows of his orbits, all sharp brow above and dark rings below.

Yes, he was trying to live on the schedule of an extremely-stressed post-Scholar student at the ripe age of eight.

“Good evening, Palamedes, Camilla. Sextus, you look like death warmed over — in a dry mummification way, rather than the superior peat bog method. I’m not sure I’d want to see a living person who became a peat bog mummy, for all that it’s my preference, as natural means of mummification go. Something about the dampness seems wrong.”

“What? I’m fine, nothing to worry about,” he tried to wave her off, but the smile on his face was a struggle that his thin face barely won. “You’ve come at just the perfect time. I need your help getting a body!”

“Do you mean a specific body, or a general body? And for what purpose — if it’s classwork, your teacher ought to have provided you with something, so feel free to go up to them,” she explained, because she did want to make sure he wasn’t getting indirectly penalized by teachers. That happened sometimes when they thought you a bit too young and uppity: they’d withhold the unspoken ways things got done and then castigate you for failing to guess.

“Oh, no, it’s independent research. There are some things I want to get a look at, or — well, a living person would be best, but it’d be a breach of ethics, so I need an adult’s signature to check out an experimental cadaver to work on. Please?” Palamedes glanced at her very quickly, sharply, with the same rapid-fire edge as his speech. But it gleamed in front of her like an open treasure chest.

“Of course, if you let me supervise,” she said, taking off at a brisk, light pace.

When they’d checked out a cadaver at one of the student labs — at this hour, the lab selected was empty, its austere white surfaces gleaming in the dim evening lights. Palamedes stood beside the cadaver on the table they’d loaded it onto, looking down into the cold dead face of a woman in her middle age, her neck snapped by a sudden fall. The reek of preservatives, rot and alcohol, filled the air. Fleshy corpses being considerably more short-lived than skeletons, they required a layer of extra formality around their care. Skeletons could last for centuries in good condition, if the student didn’t damage the bones.

On a wheeled cart, Camilla produced from a shoulder-bag the various school supplies of a young necromancer: scalpels, a reflector, a pocket torch, syringe, pins, and so on. This was the moment Juno Zeta did a quick double-take.

“You’re sticking around, Camilla? The smell is wretched; I, for one, do not miss this sort of work.” While this couldn’t be useless for the girl, it wouldn’t be quite the same. Juno dug through the assortment in her robe pockets to pull out a wrinkled handkerchief.

“I’ve got a strong stomach,” Camilla answered calmly. “Someone has to keep track of stuff he’s done with.  He won’t.”

“I won’t!” he agreed. He raised one of the corpse’s arms and palpated the lymph nodes before giving a crisp little nod. “Scalpel.”

“Scalpel,” Camilla chorused as she provided the scalpel.

“What exactly are you looking for?” Juno covered her nose with the handkerchief, muffling her voice slightly. She still grimaced when the boy, his face barely above the corpse even with a small step-stool, made the first incision, releasing a smell of old blood and formalin. He cut as for an autopsy, and for all that he was a sentimental child, he did so efficiently. Camilla passed him the forceps for the skin flaps, and he peeled them back to expose the white bones of the ribs, beyond which the organs lurked like wrapped presents in the back of a closet. 

“Call it a sort of simulation. There are textbooks, of course, but empirical experience is essential, I think; I don’t want to just — look at a book and suggest the first thing that jumps to mind. She’s probably already thought of that. Bone Saw?” He addressed this last to Camilla, who took the forceps back and retrieved the saw.

But Juno Zeta could offer a little advice there: “Score the bone with the scalpel, then just drive the cut the rest of the way with necromancy. Keeps the bone saw clean. Easy to stitch the bone back up again later, too.” He smiled and gave a quick nod, before asking Camilla for the scalpel instead. As he applied this advice, Juno continued, “Are you trying to impress someone?”

“Yes — no!” Palamedes’ ears flushed very pink. His mouth opened and shut again. He pretended to be very busy lifting the top of the ribcage with a grunt. “I mean, I think — I’d like to — I would like to be more helpful than impressive, thank you.”

“Of course,” she said, airily. “You’re dodging the implied question of whom you are trying to impress or help. I’ve been with my manuscripts all this year, so I’m sadly out of date.”

“...Hm.” For a moment, he paused over the opened corpse, his brow knitting as he considered the start on either explanation or body. Eventually, he made a second incision, like the cut of a sleeve-gusset, and peeled back the skin under the arm. “Do you remember when those diplomats from the Seventh arrived?”

“Oh, I did hear something about that. I had to take a few days to dig up some documents for them about ova preservation in advanced Heptarian blood cancer. So that’s what caught your interest? Did you hear about it when they got brought to see the old viewscreens?”

“Yes, precisely. Did you ask why they wanted to preserve the eggs of a very sick person?” He touched the same spots under the skin of the armpit as he had over the skin before. His nose crinkled a little as his world and face narrowed down to a single point.

“Of course! Their next duchess has it bad; they aren’t sure if she’ll last long enough or be healthy enough for a gravid-born child. But they also weren’t confident that her immune system wouldn’t go wild in response to an ova extraction, so they were at a crossroads about whether to wait and see or extract now. Only necromantic child of the line, as I recall, which adds urgency.” She shrugged, leaning back against one of the tables.

His bloody hands pressed hard against the spot. His other hand whipped his glasses off before they could fall from his face entirely. Their fate might have been to be chucked across the room — but Camilla had stepped closer and taken them from his unresisting hand. She laid them carefully next to the rest of the tools.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to do this manually,” he muttered. But the place he touched swelled, visibly, under his touch. His hand flitted from that to running over the exposed organs in the cadaver’s chest as he spoke. “I hadn’t thought about coagulation.”

“My advice would be to have them absorb some of the preserving fluids — it’s a lot of fine-detailed work, but if you’re thinking about blood flow, it’s the easiest way to get some fluids back in without injecting some, and either way, you’ll have to handle the absorption manually,” she advised. He grunted after a moment.

“Yes, thank you! That does the trick. Enough of the trick.” He and the veins of the cadaver — which shared his coloring and general well-being at the moment, which niggled at her about her original intentions here — both brightened as he poured thalergy in. The chest spasmed as the heart jumped to a simulacrum of life. The first few pumps were unsteady, lurching as he adjusted his control.

Juno leant over to get a look at the body laid bare as it pretended to operate at something approaching capacity. Approaching, but not quite. On the opposite side of the table, Palamedes huffed once when he met her eyes — and, without either of them saying a word, the heart steadied itself by sheer force of his will to not be embarrassing in front of her. She chuckled.

“But what’s all this for, then? I can see this has bitten you with curiosity — about Heptarian Blood Cancer specifically? About serious illnesses generally? About general circulatory functions? I hadn’t really taken you for someone passionate about organs, but wonders never cease!”

There was no immediate response: he was very focused on his examinations, though — in watching the blood vessels, in eyeing the way the swollen lymph nodes pressed up against the pleural walls.

“He’s not just curious,” Camilla answered on his behalf. He very nearly blindly reached out for something — and she provided his glasses again. His fingers left splotches on the lenses as he pushed them on. “He could do this— independently— if he were just curious.”

“My signature was required,” she reminded Camilla, who shook her head. “But you mean without you as independence, I assume?” Which earned Juno a thoughtful, maybe even concerned, nod.

“I could have fetched dinner otherwise. But I want to see, too.” Camilla shifted her weight around, drifting to look over the top of the table.

“Consider it a, a group project, of sorts,” the boy piped up. He blinked owlishly down at the cadaver. “It’s to a purpose, and it’s a purpose we agree to. Thank goodness.”

“I will tell you, if you’re hoping to solve a 10,000 year-old puzzle for them and come up with a daring solution, the Seventh will not laud you two as heroes; we’ve all had that sort of dream, and you could do worse,” she added, “But while we’d appreciate it, they probably wouldn’t accept our help if we had any to offer; they’ve been letting young Necromancers be sick for about as long as they’ve existed.”

The young necromancer jerked his chin imperiously at the cadaver.

“I wouldn’t want their praise; I wouldn’t want the praise of anyone who’d want this.” He pressed the work harder, gesturing over it as a sweep— as the lungs crushed themselves with fluid that built up— he commanded it to, replacing the body’s build-up over time. The blood vessels clogged, swelled; the most delicate burst.

She smiled and steepled her fingers together at the dramatics, feeling like she was watching a quite interesting show; Or, maybe more accurately, like she’d caught an interesting insect, some iridescent beetle of childish frustration married to talented necromancy, and now had him in a jar with some twigs for observation. So, she took the metaphorical jar, tapped the glass, and tossed him an argument to tear apart for enrichment: “If we’re being technical, it’s less that they want this , and more that they want her to be a powerful necromancer — and see this mess as a suitable trade-off.”

“They do!” He said through teeth bared like an animal cornered in its den. The heartbeat of the cadaver went arrhythmic in alarm in a way which might have mirrored his own. The sad, sluggish system of the dead body he’d been holding up fell from its orbit.

“Palamedes,” Camilla prompted — and he turned his attention back to it with a rising grunt. His shoulders jerked hard as he brought his hand to the corpse again; the vivid, copper-tangy scent of fresh blood joined the scent of spirits. His, dripping out of one nostril. It brightened the body as it fell in a sudden splatter onto the corpse. Like the smell, the color was the sole brightness against death. Camilla picked up a handkerchief and stepped closer. 

“I’m fine. Fine. Just – A little tired.” His shoulders trembling, he tried to sniff it back up like he’d been crying — this only worked for a moment. And as drawn and haggard as his face had become, there was something worse in it now, more than just a bloody nose and blood-shot eyes — an agony of the soul. He was clutching at something that burned. “The Lady Septimus’ whole body is against her; she must be in incredible pain!”

“And is this,” he gestured to himself, sweeping over the ribs heaving from the effort; the thin, stark collection of bones; the blood dripping from his nose and down his front with a long red trail on gray clothes and graying skin; his wild eyes. The hand, which covered all of him, was shaking from the strain. “Worth it? No — of course it can’t be! It could give her a lyctor’s power, and it wouldn’t be worth it! You know that.”

“I certainly wouldn’t let it past an Ethics board.” She offered it like it was another sort of handkerchief. How had they gotten to this edge? However it happened, they’d gone somewhere serious as the grave to him. “So, you want to help her.”

“Of course! How can I not— Mum, she’s already lived half her life expectancy. And what sort of life is that?” He’d risen, and now— he crumbled, blinking hard. His eyelashes brushed tears onto his glasses, smearing them. “It’s not fair,” he croaked.

“…No, it’s not. Most things aren’t, I’m afraid.” She wanted to ask him Why her? A stranger? She wasn’t even with the diplomatic party. But the words tasted bitter and cowardly in her mouth, and her stomach tightened at the idea of teaching that.

“I won’t give her up to die. I won’t. If the world can’t be fair, then I will!” He clutched that burning something close, over his heart. The tendons of his neck stood out from the effort as the bloodied boy stared at her through wet and wild eyes.

This was, she recognized, the moment. In which she must reach out a hand to alter his path, or never do so; in which he could be moderated for just one minute more; in which she could pull him out of the raw light of Dominicus before he melted like wax.

She swallowed half-a-dozen sentences that she could start, but not finish. Which was stupid. He blinked intently, eyelids fluttering. He must have realized what was happening before she did — because he tried to put a hand on the table to steady himself at the same time as he’d tried to step back onto stable ground. 

Palamedes Sextus collapsed onto the table, then slid to the floor, in one great crumbling that kept falling downward and downward. Like a tower collapsing, he landed in a heap.

“Palamedes!” Camilla screamed, perhaps for the first and last time since she’d been very small. Juno hurried around the table to join Camilla at the bottom of the step-stool, kneeling down beside the slumped-down body. She gave him a quick once-over and called his name again — no luck. Camilla’s hands opened and shut, clutched at nothing, dithered in a panic as she made a series of distressed cries.

“It’s alright,” Juno assured, without a flinch of doubt. Pulse was steadying — breathing was fine, aside from the bloody nose. “He’s just been working himself too hard — did the same once or twice— I don’t think he’s sustained serious injuries from falling, so he should be fine —”

“I shouldn’t have let him,” Camilla said without seeming to hear anything. “Should have — made him eat more. Something. It’s my fault.”

“It’s really not.” She looked at Camilla, whose distress had become fluttery, jerky movement without pause, hurrying through a million things her hands might do without doing any of them. Guilt stabbed. First rule of observation was not to tap the glass. First rule of having responsibility for a child was not this. “It’s not your responsibility. It’s barely even his, right now— you’re children, and don’t try and argue otherwise. It’s ours, and we bungled it. But he’s going to be fine.” She repeated this, hoping at least a little of it would set in. He was still out, but Camilla, at least, was catching her breath. The franticness of her hands stilled.

Now, if she wanted Camilla to panic again, she would send the girl off for help— she was a faster runner, but Juno did not think that giving her a mission was exactly in-line with what she’d just said. So, after she’d positioned Palamedes into a recovery position, she stood up. “I want you to stay with him while I go get assistance, alright? If he wakes up, tell him to keep lying down. Do not let him insist he’s fine.” 

Camilla set her mouth into a firm line and nodded, even as tears made silent tracks down her cheeks. She knelt beside Palamedes and dropped her entire focus into watching him. Her reaching fingers hesitated before removing his glasses and slipping them into her pocket.

Juno wondered if her own friends had looked like that, when she’d gotten rolling. It wasn’t something she’d considered at the time — but when she found her subject, they had ended up falling away. There was just too much to think about for that sort of relationship. For most sorts of lasting relationships. In that moment, she pitied Camilla Hect immeasurably.

Palamedes Sextus responded briefly when the nurses checked — enough to murmur an indistinct five more minutes, before he was out again in gentler fashion. His body had just decided that it had no choice but to hold him down; the nurses pronounced it exhaustion, stress, and probably hunger. They debated whether he’d be better off being sent back to the juvenile dorms, but ultimately, they wanted to be sure of his condition.

Juno Zeta had more work to do. The corpse needed stitching back up — it smelled terrible and was damp and she really regretted signing the forms for multiple reasons. One of which was that she was not going to bother with dismantling his work on the blood cells. She did take a sample of the blood to get a closer look under a microscope — recognizable lymphomas were present. Not flawless, due to having been converted to dead tumors by an overstressed, under-slept eight year-old. But, as she filled out the form detailing the cadaver’s new medical problems (numerous), she had to admit: they were good work. This was a serious endeavor.

Between fixing up and returning the cadaver and cleaning up the lab, Juno was rather unslept herself by the time it occurred to her to check in on Palamedes in the wee hours of the next morning. She was not surprised that Camilla Hect sat by his bedside. She was, though, surprised that the sense of pity she’d felt resumed when she looked at a face where the eyes couldn’t be opened wider than the dark shadows below them.

“…He’s been out the whole time,” Camilla said. The nurses coming off the night shift had already said as much.

“You should do the same. Go get some breakfast and sleep. I’ll smooth it over with any hardasses who mind you missing a day, for the both of you. I know he’s got Professor Digamma, who’s a nasty piece of work.”  Juno waved a hand like she could sweep the girl up and out of the infirmary. Camilla stood, but she lingered in place. “Go on, get. Shoo. Vamoose, Camilla Hect, or I will have to smooth things over with your fathers as well as his, which I’m not in the mood for. I’m a passable observer, if nothing else. Abscond. Egress. Go.”

This last entreaty caused her to take the abandoned glasses out of her pocket and lay them on the side table. This discharged, she went with her head drooping. Juno Zeta stretched herself into a chair and waited with some forms she needed to look over. She got about halfway through the stack before he woke up.

“Guess where you ended up,” she told him, by way of hello and also by way of basic cognitive test.

“…I will when I can see it. Where are—” He cast about, squinting hard at the various unidentifiable shapes that most people regarded as furniture. This was a pretty good answer, all things considered. Juno helpfully handed him his glasses, and he slipped them on. He continued squinting, but this time, clearly out of dissatisfaction. “…Oh. That makes sense. I… fainted, didn’t I?”

“Yes. How much have you been sleeping lately, Palamedes? In hours a night. I know you’re attending a madman’s course load — and I’d like to give your advisor’s kidneys a twist for that!...And maybe my own.”

“Four, usually. Two, sometimes. I take cat-naps,” he said, automatically. Then, as if she’d forced him to give an answer he had not intended to give — like by being asked, he had to answer — he glared nervously at her, with the whites of his eyes visible around the bottoms of his iris, like an animal that suspected it might be going to the vet. “…Am I in trouble, Archivist?”

This softened her a bit— mostly because she knew how little she’d have liked minding any adult’s urging to slow down, when she had first caught sight of just how vast the beasts could be that left behind fragmented bones in texts and relics: ideas, histories, people.

“Well, only if we’re also blaming your advisor, and your father, and myself, first. But I do have some questions. And some advice that I’d wished I’d gotten in the same phase in my life.”

“And what phase,” he bristled around the word, “is that?”

“The first and all-consuming passion of what will be a lifelong love.” The correct answer, full points; he eased and stared at her wonderingly, adjusting his glasses as if the right angle would let him see something more than he had before.

“…You? Really have something like—? I didn’t think—” Here he cut himself off and quickly swiveled his head away. As if that could disguise the pink tips of his ears. That needled at her harder than the judgment itself, which she’d heard before. The sting in the words only arose as she laughed it off and tried to put an answer to it.

“Of course! I think everyone has to love something; the person who never loved anything never is anything, except an interesting thing to study — but not to talk to. There’s no soul in that,” she answered, giving him a sort of expansive shrug. “Why Dulcinea Septimus, if you don’t mind me asking? She wasn’t there, you couldn’t have even met her. What makes her story so special?”

“…Nothing,” he answered, with a sudden rocky certainty. But he wriggled himself into an upright position and tapped the thin infirmary blankets with the air of someone putting together a string of words like it was a puzzle, and all the pieces were of the blackness of space. Haltingly, he continued, “She’s like you, a little. She smiles even when something’s hard. I can tell that much. But it’s not the same; it’s not sad when you do it.”

“Present your evidence on this; I’m dying to know the story itself, Palamedes, and you can’t just keep dangling it and taking it back,” she urged him onward. After making one final, flourishing signature on the acquisition forms, she aligned them by giving them a shuffling tap against her thigh.

“I wrote her a letter. Asking what I could do to help, because — because I don’t know what to do. Someone has to do something. It’s not fair for her to be shut away forever, afraid of breathing. It’s not fair.” This was a sad, desperate refrain — a child’s refrain — as tears budded in his eyes for a woman he’d never actually met. He took a shaking breath and continued: “She wrote me back.

 “‘ Dear Palamedes, (May I call you Pal? That’s Pal as in Friend and Pal for abbreviation, if you’d let me)

“‘I must say, you’ve flattered me tremendously with your letter. I’ve never been called an expert in anything before, much less gotten fan mail! I’ve bragged about it to Pro — that’s my cav, who is a sweetheart — until his ears could fall off. Don’t worry, I haven’t told him what it said. I didn’t know if you’d be alright with me being an incurable gossip, so do let me know if I can show you off. I don’t get out much (you can imagine) so having a surprise correspondent was a DELIGHT to lord around Castle Rhodes.

“‘I’d rather be an expert in anything else, but I will take what acclaim I can get from a member of the Sixth. Those maudlin bores probably painted a rather bleak picture of my condition with their crocodile tears and their absolutely ghastly bullshit. They’re lucky I don’t intend to lie to you, or I’d say I’m fine just to spite them. I’m not; it is, in fact, just as ghastly and maybe about TWICE as bullshit as they say. Still, I try to avoid gloom and doom by keeping my head up and looking for things that don’t suck; being miserable about it all the time would be so much worse than just dying. In that, your letter is a wonderful shield for me .’

 “Keeping her head up and looking for things that don’t suck,” he repeated at the end of that long recitation, wondering and agonized, until his mouth stretched in something too sad to be a smile and too tender to be a grimace. When he blinked, tears rolled out and down his face all over again. “’Flattered her’? As if she wasn’t flattering me.”

“A remarkable lady, the lady Septimus. I see where that’d inspire invention,” she told him honestly. But when he began to nod eagerly, hungrily, she added, “Palamedes. How you’ve been going about this is not sustainable. You know it’s not. Burnout is an inevitability at that rate, and that’s not something that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old to be worrying about.”

“I could not worry about it,” he said, attempting levity — his smile aimed to be sly, but it fumbled the whole way.

“You’re old enough for abstract thinking by a long margin; you can’t take defense in being literal.”

“…That’s true. But, she doesn’t have time for me to — to be slow about it.” He leaned forward, one hand not quite reaching for contact across the white blanket — the other removed his glasses to polish off the tears. Unmasked, the tears still waiting to fall made multifaceted diamonds of his eyes, intense in their hunger or their desperation.

“If getting a good night’s sleep would doom her, then you probably can’t save her at all.” 

Like those words bared fangs, he recoiled into a protective hunch; his glasses fell from his hands, rolled off his lap as he contracted, and clattered off the bed. He didn’t seem to notice — the line of his mouth and the constriction of his pupils into a sea of white and off-white all screamed an utter betrayal. It made him look once again like a little baby bird, shaking.

“Palamedes —”

 “You must stand by your words, Archivist,” he said, the formality coming up like a shield. “I will just have to prove you wrong.”

“No, I won’t stand by those. Or, at least, I won’t stand by them the way you understood them. This isn’t about your capabilities.” She rose; the smile was gone from her face now, and it didn’t know what should replace it — didn’t know the solemnity she needed to call on now. “If she’s in such dire straits that you can’t afford taking care of yourself, then she’s already well beyond the point where she can be helped with curative science or necromancy — all anyone can do is comfort. That’s all.”  

She set aside her paperwork on the nightstand, crouched down to meet him at his own level — which bewildered rather than comforted him. He looked around, afraid to meet her eyes— like there was someone else she was trying to be closer to, someone else in her stone-gray gaze.

“It simply isn’t possible to save everyone, Palamedes. There’s chance in there, and misfortune, and there’s opportunity cost: that by saving some people, you take up the time you’d need to save others. That’s just the way the universe is. Entropy is inevitable.”

“That’s all the more reason to try and save everyone I can.” His answer sounded very small and frightened — like he himself was only now finding the enormity of his own wishes, the absurdity of them. Like he saw himself reflected in her eyes, a small child. He nervously wet his lips. But it was not uncertain, not at all, and the small, shuddering breath he took brought him back to look at her. “If I can’t reach everyone, then I can’t surrender whatever I can reach. That’s the only way I’ll know who I could save.”

“Good.” She bent down to pick up his glasses. They’d landed on the floor with one arm bent out of shape. “I know I’m not much of a — maternal sort —“ (“You shock me,” he muttered on automatic) “—But there’s a part of that duty I find I do really take as mine. As your mother, the one thing I never want to do, never in all of time, a myriad of myriads — is decide what battles you can and cannot fight, what things you can and cannot seek. I don’t have the right to clip your wings, Palamedes Sextus. No one does. It’s my job to be absolutely blown away by how far you’ll go.” She guided them back onto his face, sweeping back his hair when she tucked the arms behind his ears. She smiled again, more softly. He blinked intently at her through his glasses, speechlessly, like he saw her for the very first time. Well, that perhaps made two of them. “But as your teacher, it’s my job to build you the habits you’ll need to fly. Don’t surrender them to your own exhaustion or haste; that’s as bad as giving up. Taking care of yourself is taking care of those who rely on you and those who love you.”

That made him laugh, just a little — a smile of relief blossoming on his face as they found familiar ground again. Juno Zeta removed her hands from the sides of his head, suddenly brusque and businesslike again.

“…That’s asking a lot,” he said, forcing a smile to cover over whatever had passed now.  “But I do see your point and will take it into consideration. I’ll have a word with Professor Secten about how to…adjust my schedule, a little.”

Like someone who had no idea what to do with her hands, she stood up and dusted them off. They were shaking a little, numb from their own — tenderness? Maybe. Maybe tenderness. Maybe just a little bit of awe.

“Good, good. Camilla will be happy to hear it,” she said, a little hurriedly. Then she laughed and relaxed, all at once, like she’d stepped into a hot water-bath.

“Hm. Yes…I suppose I’ll have to do something. She hasn’t been sleeping well lately.” He crossed his arms and looked aside; he drummed his fingers against his upper arms, looking serious as a world-weary fifty-year-old jammed into an eight-year-old necromancer.

“Oh, you noticed she wasn’t! Of course, that’s the takeaway! But I’d be glad if you would. And, you know?” She smiled and ruffled his hair. “I really hope you can do that girl some good. They’ve had a myriad of that disease; show them what happens when the Sixth House sets its sights on something.”

“Oh, I will,” and now he beamed up at her with bared teeth in his smile.

Chapter Text

After that, he slowed down, just a little. Still did more than anyone else in his year, shooting up through grade-points. But not so severely, his eyes not so shadowed or so sunken. Still, it occurred to Juno that something had changed. Something had burnt: for a window of just a few years, Camilla’s company had let him find that he was a child, a boy who could enjoy his boyhood, rather than a very small, grave ancient. She understood that child only now that she saw that the child had been incinerated, had burnt himself down to a blackened stub. What stumbled out, smoking, had only the faint glimmer of that boyhood — at least where she could see it.

If she’d thought that the infant Palamedes Sextus resembled a heron, then what emerged after the child had burned past his years was a different sort of bird. Not physically — he was growing more lanky all the time — save in one respect. There was something of a bird in all of what she considered the Archives branch of the tangled hedgerow that was the Sixth House, in their certain restlessness and sudden movements.

In Metabus and his daughters, it was raptorial, in the nose and the hard edges of their eyes, of their intent stares and sharp, tenacious grips; a hawk, too, in the easy joy of flight that she saw in Metabus or Camilla at work. In the moment of greatest effort, they felt the rush of air.

In herself, it was something corvid, the raucous and brilliant mischief, the cleverness that gave itself easily to joy. A joy in little shiny trinkets, too, which she collected and discarded with equal ease.

In the boy, Palamedes Sextus, it took on an owl’s edge. It had taken him many years to grow out of the squint he’d developed to compensate for naturally poor vision — in some ways, he never did, especially when he wanted to shift from seeing something up-close to something in the distance. But now that it was a choice, he had then switched to the reverse: to a big, luminous stare that stretched his face taut. It lent him a knowing quality, the eyes shining out of the dark and drinking up everything. The owl did not look like a predator, too, until its talons gripped in the night. And it was rather extremely engineered towards its purpose: the breadth of its vision in the dark, the silence of its flight.

She had plenty of time to hone these observations, and sometimes even to share them, though at least once, Palamedes asked her only “Isn’t that generalizing from descriptions? It’s not like either of us has ever seen any of these birds.”

“If that stopped people from referencing things, we’d all be significantly worse off.  We’d probably have to electrocute ourselves, touch hot stoves, and eat a lot of spoiled food if ideas could not be transmitted from one person to another without empirical experience,” she’d told him. That had at last earned a pensive concession — and they’d gotten back to what they were doing. She’d taken a somewhat more engaged approach to the boy, which was part of where these observations came from. When she brought him along as an attache for work, it was a richer and more complex experience of it; other times, he — with Camilla or without, depending on their schedules, which could not always be in perfect alignment — would come to her office for advice about classes and assignments, wrangling his way through the administrations to push himself further along — in this, Juno Zeta, who’d made Scholar at 15, had quite a lot to lend him. And she found she really wanted to lend him these things. The world was a little funny like that.

So, with those formal pursuits came bits of training, practices, lessons. Often, these involved inorganic psychometry, which was one of Juno’s particular strengths. She found she quite liked watching the kids puzzle out a challenge set before them or absorbing some understanding she could dish out. Sometimes, they even surprised her — and for that, she liked them — the lessons and the kids — very much.

Palamedes himself did not always enjoy these lessons. That was his problem.

In the cool of her office, Juno Zeta turned a little metal globe around in her hands. The globe was about the size of an orange, but it was lighter than it looked. It was cast iron — someone had made a mold, and in that mold, they had carved the shape of alien landmasses for her fingers to dance across.

When Palamedes Sextus came into her office, she rose.

“Think fast,” she told him, passing the orb to him. He still nearly dropped it, so surprised at having it thrust into his hands instead of, say, thrown at him — but it was an antique , and she wasn’t going to let it get banged up. “Shoddy, just shoddy,” she commented, as the twelve-year-old made a series of fizzing noises, like electronics on the fritz, and tried to recapture the ball that seemed to keep rolling and tumbling out of his hands — which he was having some trouble with even aside from the ball.

“What — I just — my thesis — What is this?” her student asked, blinking intensely at her and at the sphere.

“That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Tell me about it.” Juno had found it an interesting thing to examine, and he’d make good use of the practice with inorganics. The boy spent too much time thinking about messy things like organs.

He sighed wearily and landed in his usual chair with force that seemed to knock him ajar. Juno Zeta leaned against the desk, drumming her fingers on its edge. Like that was a relief, he closed his eyes and sighed again.

Blue flames traced the outlines of the continents as he ran his fingers over the surface and lingered like the wake of a ship.

“Approximately 135 years of age,” he said, in a voice that was very nearly a croak. And in his normal voice, clearing his throat, he added, “Very approximately. The planet it was made on was mid-transition; high background thalergy, but no longer wholly thalergetic.”

“And that means what about the age? You’re almost there,” she added, because he seemed in a mood where he needed some encouragement, discombobulated.

“It means it’s slightly older than initial estimates,” he answered numbly. “Call it 137. It’s had a few owners, including its original creator — who –“ And here, he twitched, almost a flinch — sending both restless fingers and flames skittering in seemingly random directions. Even old, just a washed-up remnant, the thanergy spike of immediate death had a feeling — almost over-stimulating. “Was a soldier,” a bigger flinch followed, “And died with it in their pocket. Spear, through the heart — very near, so they kept it in a jacket pocket. Is that enough?”

“Keep going, what about the next one? Sort it out,” she urged. “Take your time, but sort through it. You can replace speed with thoroughness, here.”

“Alright.” He undercut himself with another heavy sigh. His eyes opened a crack, a glimmer of gray between his reddened eyelids. He sank a little further back into the chair, like he could disregard his body and leave it behind, exist as nothing but a spirit sensing the sphere. The flames guttered. “The second one: shorter, I mean, owned it for less time, not literally. No data on elevation. Died in a bombing –“ Here, the sliver of his gaze focused onto the orb. He slowed, letting the spirit flames fall low to make the shapes of distant continents visible. “Which didn’t damage the sphere aside from maybe a superficial scorching; there’s a little discoloring, but no dents or indicators of significant repairs.”

“Good catch! And the third?”

“…Yes, Archivist,” he chorused. Her brows furrowed as she watched an unusually pallid and dull-skinned Palamedes wiggle a hand over the sphere. His forehead was his only splash of color — very lightly pinked with blood sweat.  This normally didn’t exhaust him so much. “The third survived — a cohort necromancer — changed planetary deployment, I think — given the abrupt change in thalergy exposure seventy years back. Stopped being kept on-person, likely into storage. Wrapped in flimsy. From there, it made its way to us. That’s all.”   

He leaned forward and plopped it on the desk, where it rolled into a pile of documents — she had to turn fast to prevent a full-scale flimsy-slide. 

"Someone brought this charming little artifact back from an extramural trip," she explained.

"It's lovely," mumbled Palamedes. He hunched in his chair again. "About my scholar's thesis, though, Archivist –"

"What, then, pupil, does it mean for you to be able to know all of this?”

“That I’m not getting to ask you about my work until I’m done. For pity’s sake, Archivist,” her pupil grumbled. Then he straightened and tried again. “But seriously — broadly, It means that it has been impacted by successive exposure to thalergy and thanergy — and, in some cases, to their absence. These impacts are spiritual, rather than physical, but the physical material can still inform in its own ways. For one, because it’s iron, it has a different retention of energy compared to organics or plastics — or even other metals.” He adjusted his glasses, revealing dark shadows in the space normally covered by the frames. 

“Yes, all very true! There’s one detail more that catches my attention that I think you’re missing, Sextus. It’s close to what you’ve gotten. Care for a guess?” She held it up, cupped in her fingers, letting it catch the clean white lights of her study.

“…That these links become profoundly fuzzy — scattered and inconsistent, difficult to place — prior to the point where the metal was cast — that the thanergenic connections of the ore itself are disrupted by the process of melting down and reshaping metal. But these are…Obstructions? I think. Rather than destructions.” His brow, still dotted with blood sweat, furrowed — several beads were pushed together into the canyon, running a small trail of blood down his long, beaky nose. “If there’s a way to destroy a link, I don’t know it, but I can’t imagine it’s been done here.”

“There isn’t one I know of; I’d be terrified if there was, frankly. I think it might be like destroying a soul.” She shuddered at the thought. “Well, you’re taking your time to get to what I’m looking at.”

“…Archivist, please forgive me, but I really did come here for a reason, not a guessing game.” He leaned forward until his head flopped onto the desk. Palamedes clasped together the knobbly collection of joints and twigs he called hands in supplication. “Have mercy. It’s crunch time.”

“I was wondering when you’d cry uncle!” She exclaimed, letting it out like a held breath. Finally. “Yes, by all means! Take a break!”

“…You were — you — Archivist — all that was just — this was a test?” He proceeded to let out an agonized moan, an animal howl of pure misery. His head met the desk, which was not the first time its flimsy veneer had been stained with a little forehead blood.

“Life is a test, my boy.” She patted the top of his head. This produced another sound like a baby deer in distress. “Go on, wipe your face. How long have you been up?”

“…What day is it?” He asked blearily into the desk.

“It’s Thursday, though if you’ve forgotten what week it is, I’ll be rather cross; I thought you’d promised to not be halfway to dying every time your heart is moved.”

“…Then…Two? Two days.” This got him another pat on the head. She remembered those days, with some mix of fondness and hate. “I was preparing for my defense. Which is, if it’s Thursday, tomorrow. Which is why,” he finally lifted his head up from the desk.  “I came here — to know if you had any final notes — on my scholar’s thesis.” He tilted his head towards the rescued stack of flimsy beside him. “Which is, in fact, directly next to me at this moment of time. Have you noticed that?”

“Of course it’s next to you; you’ve thrown yourself across my desk to be dramatic about it.” Her long, thin fingers nudged at him like a broom, battering against his dark hair. With her other hand, she took the stack of flimsy from beside him. “Sextus, you know it’s good; you know it’s too late if it wasn’t. I would not have let you get this far if you weren’t ready. What’s the pressure this time?”

“…Camilla already submitted the paperwork,” he admitted. Her fingers tapped at his head, until he eventually lifted it. His glasses were roughly diagonal across his face, and as he adjusted them, he noticed the look the Archivist wore: Mild curiosity, mixed with the slight quirk of her eyebrows that said she hadn’t the foggiest about what he meant.

“What paperwork would that be?”

“To take the exams to be my cavalier, of course. But if I don’t make Scholar, she’ll get declined before they even test her due to an unqualified adept, and you know everyone will find out, and I can’t let Camilla down like that. So I want absolutely everything perfectly aligned, completed, and sound. It’s good work, of course, just — preparing . ” He explained it all in one big rush, before she could say anything to the initial bombshell — leaving her looking out over the scattered bits of emotional shrapnel.

“This smacks of sentiment, Sextus,” she told him, quite bluntly: No matter how Zeta looked at it, she couldn’t see a practical reason. He had never seemed inclined before to join the cohort — indeed, they both had said otherwise.

“No, not really. She simply saw my success as inevitable and acted from there — about which I’m having feelings both squishily sentimental and rather pressured, but I think I’m on top of it.”

“Don’t be — anxious, I mean. You’ll beat my pace of 15 with over two full years to spare, have no fear.” She tapped the precious stack of flimsy to get all the pages aligned, busying herself with the motion. “But I was referring to having a cavalier at all. I know every scholar with aptitude has the right — but most of us just don’t see a point.”

It wasn’t that the choice of Camilla was surprising — it wasn’t, even slightly. Or even that Camilla’s main goal had been within the physical education stream. But within the Library, there was little use for a cavalier. No tournaments, no honor duels that didn’t take the form of corrections to their corrections to your corrections, very little of the sort of flash and drama that gave even the most social of cavaliers some job to do. A cavalier of the Sixth, outside a few cohort necromancers’ cavaliers (which were not wide-spread), was more often a personal assistant — and, well, you could just get an assistant. For Juno Zeta, even the thought of one of those — someone getting their grubby mitts all over her personal encoded documents, someone trying to put her carefully organized system of seemingly random stacks of flimsy, sorted so the highest priority documents were all always in her field of vision, out of that order by trying to make them organized — turned her nearly green.  

“Oh, well. I think I’ll have use for a cavalier, given time,” said the boy with a sudden calm. Speaking of her carefully controlled chaos, one document with a different header stuck to the bottom of the thesis. She raised an eyebrow at it in momentary consternation and leant over the stack to make sure it was the only one — her long, quick fingers flying through them. He probably could at least use an assistant, one day — she was getting to that point, whether she liked it or not. “And if I didn’t have an end that could fit the both of us, I’d have had to invent one.”

“I was right — you, Palamedes Sextus, are a bleeding heart. A pure romantic.” With a crisp smile, she passed over his work.  “Which might handily explain your propensity for dramatically plopping yourself onto desks, making a mess of them.”

“Your feedback has been duly noted.” He was already scanning those stick-ons, skirting over them. Some of them were notes, because you could never really be free of notes — but they were about future research, or tips, or likely questions they’d ask. Others were just observations. And even a few of what any scholar needed to get through their labors — a little praise.

Perhaps he had found the one on which she had written in her slanted handwriting The work of a master of his subject. His eyes softened, and he let out a slightly breathless chuff.

“Thank you, Archivist, for the help.”

“Think nothing of it; it’s quite fun! Now, your last preparation for this is to get some rest. They’ll rake you over the coals, but it’ll be about 80% bluster, and mostly things you’ll already have demanded of yourself.”

“Ah, but your — the orb,” he faltered.

“Just tell me when you have a guess. It’s a philosophical question for its own sake, anyway, so you’ll probably get it when you’ve had some time for it to simmer.”

“…I hate that.” His brows crossed with the mild disgruntlement of someone still tempered by feeling, but she shooed him off to deal with the looming distraction of a mildly puzzling question.

She had only the time to wipe the trace of blood off her desk and set the orb onto it to ponder once more before his head poked from around her partially-open door; dark hair mussed, robes askew, and looking like he’d run the entire way once the thought had dawned.

“…The fact that we can know this is a reflection —” he had to catch his breath, “—Of the fact that each of its bearers, and each of the worlds on which it was handled, created a web of energy which is unique to this particular object — the fact that it was kept and handled all meaning — something! To the existence of the sphere. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” She beamed, and held up the metal to the light. It glinted in the same color as her eyes, and she turned it in one hand like the little world it was. “While it was never alive — it was changed by its own path through the universe. It tells a story, and that story is of how coming into contact with the universe changed this collection of atoms into a piece of art.”

Palamedes was less impressed. He brought a hand deliberately around the door so she could see it make contact with his bepinked forehead.

“Lord over the River, Mum, that’s true of everything.” He groaned, which only increased Juno’s bright, sharp smile in response.

“Precisely, Palamedes! It’s exactly true of everything in the entire universe, and it’s different for everything in the entire universe,” she announced with slightly malicious light, her other hand outstretched to display something. Her eyes fell onto it radiantly, onto the continents and oceans of a world she’d never see, save in this little model — but that she could feel some part of in her hands. Like any fresh mapping of the stars, it was partly a game of knowing by inference. “Isn’t that wonderful? I’d call it almost a fragment of soul — or maybe, more suitable for this little trinket, a very miniature version of a planet’s network of thanergy and thalergy. A trace of the true self, existing in the false self — or something like that.”

“…And you call me a romantic,” said the romantic.

“Well,” said his mentor briskly, “I never said it was a bad thing, as long as the results are logically sound. And, hey — at least you figured it out before you tried to sleep, so it won’t wake you up in the middle of the night.”

He groaned again, but she’d won that one — because the groan faded into a chuckle.

Of course he succeeded — and when her application was processed and her exams assigned, so did Aspirant Camilla Hect. Scholar and Aspirant, respectively, before the age of thirteen was nothing to sneeze at. Even 15 was territory for proper smugness, or so Juno Zeta always allowed herself. But it was several months later when the pair really started to get some attention, outside the relatively small circle of those who had watched them their whole lives. That was, of course, when they’d opened the Sex Study and walked into a mystery. She’d caught then, in his greedy hunger for more grade points, another glimpse of whatever ambition lurked under the surface.

That year, Master Warden Rhea Seck passed. She had been Master Warden when Juno Zeta had made Scholar, and had handed that first diploma to her. It stung as a tragedy — and as a mess. It had been a sudden, all-at-once sort of death; she’d been fine one week and dead the next, over and done, with little chance for her to make arrangements. There was never time to make arrangements with people, who kept acting like death was not going to come for them. Still, her ghost came easily, and from that, they were able to extract a good memorial quote and what she wanted done. Within the six months of mourning customary, they had a plan for the exams to follow nicely laid out, and were able to proceed with the first round of tests.

It wouldn’t do to miss the biggest round of exams in fifty years if you intended to have any ambitions. A regular exam season was a time when the whole House was energized and gathered together — this? This was something else entirely.  Of course she applied to take the first round of examinations, which was really just to weed out the obviously unsuitable candidates (because no one would miss the biggest round of exams in fifty years). And she passed through the winnowing layers of examinations — necromantic exams and written exams, exams that asked questions or demanded research — over the course of weeks. She passed through the first five rounds of examination without breaking a sweat. Which left her in a very small club indeed: all of whom were on, or would eventually likely join, the Oversight Body. She knew how well she’d done the moment she left the test chamber, and could step out into the hushed hallway in the core with her head held high.

At the same time, another figure was stepping out of his own test chamber. Smaller — but getting taller seemingly every time she turned her head. He had his own slightly jittery smile on his face, eyes lighting up every corner; the smile of one afraid of the satisfaction he clearly felt, the trembling point between excitement and anxiety. When he saw her, he started.

“Archivist! I thought you’d be here, but not — here, here, I mean. Funny, being next door for the exams — I suppose it would make sense depending on how they’ve arranged the charting, though now that I think about it — it’d be too tangled for any of the versions that made real sense,” Palamedes rambled, his hands turning in circles about as much as his mind was, the ease gone and just the jitters remaining. His fingers twitched. “I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

“A bit. I’ll take no offense, though; you’re clearly still on adrenaline. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to expect to see you here — but I admit, you caught me off-guard, too,” Juno answered, sidestepping the tangles he was working himself in. The capacity to surprise her made him smile again.

“Probably because, as I have been reminded approximately eighteen times over the course of these exams, I’m only thirteen.” He tapped his fingers together, as if their fluttering could work out the rest of his energy. He huffed through his teeth. “I came in there very steady; I don’t know why I’m shaking now.”

“Well, how did it go?” They fell into step together towards the junction where the testing chambers met the rest of the Core. No one but examiners and examinees were allowed past a certain point.

“…Flawlessly, but that’s not the problem, is it?”

“What is, then? If you’re looking to make a point that you’re not too young — then making it this far, doing well at the highest general level — here’s the part where you’ve made your point! About half of us are stepping out to avoid conflicts of interests or simple waste. You’re aware of this, I hope?” This was not a secret; it was well-understood that resume padding stopped before things got Very Serious, to save everybody time and space. But she was not sure if that had reached him — because this was a social distinction, and he, socially, was still in the stacked-up limbo of living in the Juvie Dorms as a full Scholar.

“No. Really?” He blinked a few times from behind his glasses.

“I swear, they really need to sort out what to do with children like you; they didn’t when I made Scholar, either. You miss so much useful information when you’re being kept to the juvie schedule while doing a scholar’s work. Most of it is gossip, but it’s useful gossip, and you can’t keep your finger on any pulse going through the offices!” She didn’t blush when she’d realized how loud she’d gotten, but she did cut herself off from that ramble. “Ah, got carried away. Yes, really. It keeps things straightforward for the examiners, you see.”

“And would you step out of this?” He asked, a little doubtfully.

“I don’t intend to be Master Warden, so yes. My true love has always been the archives, and I don’t think there’s a title or a payment you could give me to leave them, but I think this would cement my place quite handily as the next Master Archivist, so here I am — all to not get passed over again. You’re not the only one in the universe who’s had to deal with lack of seniority sabotaging you.”

“Good to know,” he said, faintly smiling as they rounded the corner and, waiting for him at the intersection, Camilla Hect came into view. Camilla flashed him a tiny, bright smile that said I knew you could do it, and he at last eased into complete serenity with whatever the examination board would decide. Before he parted from Juno, he smiled slyly.  “Less competition that way.”

His name was not removed from the list of candidates when the meeting time came to determine who’d be taking the last exam and presenting their research. The long table at the Oversight Conference Room was, as usual, strewn with folders full of flimsy. Academic records, test scores, assessments, and publications by every name on the list lay before the assembled Body, and they focused their attention to each one in turn.

The list did not contain Juno Zeta’s name, for the reasons already described. There was no point. Nor did it contain the names of most of the Senior Fellows, nor any of the participating Masters, who’d all helpfully withdrawn. 

It was a shame the Chair of Mathematics, Master Scholar Icara Sexaginta, had not gotten the memo. They all had to sit there, waiting for the moment when someone had to turn their attention to her, wondering if she had the pure gaucherie to recommend herself without even leaving the room, or if one of her research colleagues would do it for her. After a moment in which her blunt and imposing face was very smug and satisfied, Icara Sexaginta opened her mouth to speak.

“I think we ought to consider Scholar Palamedes Sextus.” So Juno had to steal her thunder with both spite and aplomb. Juno grinned at just how much it had foiled the Chair of Mathematics’ wishes — Sexaginta had a face that was as easily read as it was easily red, though usually from strenuous speechifying, rather than (as now) shock and anger. There were other reactions; A few people started, surprised but not offended (she was glad for the surprised) by the lesser nepotism of recommending her son — who had, for all his nerves, been second to no one on the fifth exam.

“I was rather thinking about him as well,” said the Master Scholar who was the head of Archeology. They adjusted their sheets of flimsy to take a look at the background and assessments in front of them.“I was very impressed by his report on the Affair of the Sex Study —”

“Sometimes I think someone’s calling it that as a joke, you know, and I want you to know it’s a puerile joke and we are not amused,” someone piped up, because it had been a whole minute since someone had been contrarian — aside from Juno, anyway.

“Really? I am,” responded someone from Agricultural Biology. They were all weirdos, though, who saw sex in everything; it was all the working with birds and bees and so on. How anything got done there, Juno had no clue, but if they didn’t put food on the table, half of them probably just would have been farmed out to the Nireids and been done with it.

“Are we neglecting…” And here, Icara had to pause mid-bluster, aware that if she came out and said ‘That we’re having this discussion in the presence of his mother,’ it would sound so much worse when she raised her own subject later. At least she had figured that much out. So she did not have her usual head of steam when she substituted, “…That he’s all of thirteen?”

“I don’t see why that matters here and now; whether he’s capable of succeeding is a matter of the test being carried out,” said Juno brightly. She brought her hands together, rubbing them with a degree of anticipation that brought the whole room to focus on them. “If his lack of experience would stop him, it can stop him then. No, I’m not impartial — but I know Scholar Sextus better than most of you, and I’m game to see how far he’ll go.”

This gave a number of the people crowded around the long conference table for a thoughtful pause.

“Well, as an experiment…  There’s a great deal a young man might learn from the exercise,” murmured the Master of Agricultural Biology, who Juno suspected rather liked the boy.   

“This is rather too important for an experiment; the fifth wave of exams is fine enough if you simply intend to prove an academic point,” said another member of the Body.

“And it wasn’t enough of a challenge for him,” argued a third. ‘Look at the assessment. He had the entire exam eating out of the palm of his hand.”

“That metaphor feels muddied right from the outset.”

“I’d point out that if the only question was ‘are they qualified to take it,’ then he and everyone else who scores sufficiently on the fifth exam would be undertaking the final examination. Whether he would gain something, and whether he could succeed, are both secondary to the real task this body is convened to discuss.” Master Scholar Melchior Hexadecimal, one of the oldest Master Scholars and the current Chair of Special Examinations, made his normally reedy voice rise above the din. The chatter stilled. It was with great gravity that the old Master Scholar said, “Which is: Do we think, if this person were capable of superior results on the examination, they would make a suitable Master Warden? Are we secure in our minds that we would gladly accept and abide by such a result, if they can produce it? For the 11 names we have approved so far, we have agreed.”

“He is undeniably a genius, even at the beginning of his career,” commented one of the other Fellows.

“That’s the thing, isn’t it, though? The names we’ve removed from the list have black marks that have emerged over the length of their career. He’s published some fantastic papers, yes; his reports and thesis were brilliant, yes. But we’ve barely had time to test his mettle. It’d be agreeing blindly, without more than a rough estimate as to what we’re getting into.” That observation, delivered as one of the graver Master Scholars sorted through the document containing a summary of his thesis, seemed to capture a worried mood that sent ripples of argument through the room: 

“As if we don’t have the capacity to remove a Master Warden,” said one person, while Sexaginta responded immediately, and maybe even earnestly, “As though we want to have to take that option!”

“That,” said Melchior Hexadecimal, slowly and carefully turning his eyes to the various Masters and Fellows and Chairs who’d taught Palamedes over the years, to the members of the Archives and Collections departments who had watched the boy for half his life, to Metabus, sitting at the far end as a Junior Fellow, and then slowly onto Juno Zeta herself. “Is all the more reason to give weight to those who know him best.”

With that laid to her feet, the Archivist nodded. She could have stopped and considered if he really wanted this — if the argument that sprang to her tongue was the right one; if he wouldn’t be better served by a harder lesson.

But she was never one to slow down when she knew the answer, and she thought: I’d fail him as a teacher, if I held him back now.

“I’d agree — and I think if you saw him as being his mentor has allowed me to see him, you’d agree. Those of you who have taught him likely already do. I wouldn’t have brought him up otherwise.” She had seen him with a problem in his teeth, holding it onto it until it gave in; she thought of him excitedly showing her his new technique which used the permeability of copper — which he had inadvertently discovered — as a sort of resistor, making thanergy last a bit longer as part of a construct. She thought of the way he more or less hosted his own classes for struggling students these days, a gentle teacher like his father (this, he’d begun after meeting Camilla; he’d stopped after corresponding with Dulcinea Septimus; he’d returned to after making Scholar. Maybe that was a mark on him). “When I say I want to see how far he’ll go, I mean exactly that: I have no clue where his ambitions end or the limits of his mind. I’m excited for that like you wouldn’t believe! He’s young, yes, and at times far too smug. He thinks he can hold the whole universe in his hands.” It was Camilla Hect in her mind’s eye, then; Camilla Hect who had said I want to be helpful, and told him they had one end. As far as she knew, Palamedes was still receiving letters from the Seventh.

“I’d trust him to hold the Sixth House; he’s probably already decided it’s his responsibility, from before the exams were even announced.” She couldn’t help but laugh at that. “His character is firm, and what’s more, it’s moral.” This sank in across a long, ruminative pause.

“Hm. Thank you for your assessment, Archivist Zeta. In the light of this and his previous performances, I can see no reason for a serious objection,” Hexadecimal concluded, after they’d all dutifully chewed and digested those words. It was surprising — maybe even gratifying — to see other people give Palamedes Sextus’ folder another look before giving their own nods.

In the end, 16 people were judged worthy of taking the final test, a solemn and grave challenge. This included Sexaginta, because they were being fair: a whiff of academic dishonesty or misconduct was a barring offense; being a blowhard and self-promoter within ethical limits was not.

The Archivist did not immediately hear how Palamedes Sextus did: the deliberation was long, the test involved, and all of it demanded secrecy. Slowly, the research completed and presented for the purpose of the Master Warden exams began to filter into publication: first, from the people who had hoped to make it to the final presentations but had failed at some earlier stage; Then, slowly, from the final applicants. This was the subject of high speculation, clusters of people in offices, classrooms, and hallways gathering to review and debate them, judging chances from this one major sliver of pre-announcement information. Several betting pools arose, each using a different method of calculating odds and therefore, in intense competition with each other.

Then, On the Plasticity of Molecular Structures Upon the Introduction of Spirit Magic dropped like an incendiary into the unsuspecting betting pools. It was known long ago that the material could be spontaneously altered by the immaterial, that the body followed the soul.  The paper asked How, on the smallest, most fine-grained level? Is there a difference between how far different sorts of structures are able to change? Perhaps most telling, most remarkably, were the sections dedicated to defining — no, creating — terms for talking about the varieties of trace psychometric readings one could get from molecules; that showed a compelling attention to outreach, which was promising for the purposes of the examination. It also showed that the author supposed that there was a community of people capable of psychometry so fine-tuned they could scan on the level of the cellular or molecular on the regular, who just needed the language to express what energy from The River did to covalent bonds. There were perhaps a handful of such adepts, on their best days; for many, the paper was their introduction to the idea that that level of detail was comprehensible. Here, the paper displayed, was a necromancer, shouting out the name of Palamedes Sextus to the universe.

The bookies panicked in the rush of changed bets and changing odds that hunted them down the hallways. 

Juno invited the author of this treatise to the office post-work mid-week hangout, where he flushed and had to adjust his glasses a lot, but everyone clapped him on the back. Camilla very nearly glowed with happiness in his wake. No one said ‘Here’s the Master Warden,’ but it radiated through the room. Not so much so that he got special deference during the ‘food cladistics argument’ section of the evening, over dinner, but he wouldn’t have gotten that if the Emperor had personally appeared and said he was right about sandwichization (“In the vein of carcinization! The tendency of all foodstuffs to evolve into the form of sandwiches!”) being a thing.

“Do you play chess, Scholar Sextus?” asked Ty, a longstanding member of the team, at the dawning of the board game section of the evening. The boy pulled a face.

“Not if I can help it,” he said with a little bark of laughter. “It’s all decided too early, there’s nothing to shake it up, or make it swing in an unexpected way. There’s no real competition to it. Play Camilla if you’d like to — she’s good, and she doesn’t get bored when she knows how the game will play out.” He gestured to his intended cavalier, whose expression didn’t change — but she rolled her neck in the easy way she had before anything competitive.

“Then what’s your game?”

“Backgammon, but I’ll take anything where you can play with luck as well as skill. Though, there is an exercise I like to do with a suitable chess set.”

“How would you define suitable here?” Juno asked, from where she was already laying out a game. “I’d imagine bone, if it’s a necromantic exercise, unless you’ve got something particular in mind. Would the dyes make a difference?”

“They do, but that’s valuable for this. Yes, bone for preference, but if the set’s very old, other materials will do…if you want a challenge.” His eyes lit up. The three lines of the coffee table and the old, stuffed couches backed on one side to the lunch table — which, in an unusually crowded break room, resulted in the people directly behind Palamedes having to turn around to see him. “The key factor is age and frequency of use — old and often, for preference.” He leaned over the couch toward the coffee table where the chess set was laid out, gawky teen arms straining over the gap. “Well, anyway, the idea is you take readings of a piece, and try to narrow down a particular — arbitrary, really — point of contact with a square on the board. From there, you keep track of the time signatures you’re looking at, like a sort of wavelength, to follow the corresponding times on the remaining pieces.” He gave up on actually reaching a piece from behind the couch, and instead settled back into his chair.

It was Julia who picked up a chess piece and turned it over and over between their hands.

“…You could track a whole game that way, given enough time and patience,” they mused.

“Precisely!” he declared. “This did result in regular chess being a lot more boring, so at your own peril. I got the idea from you, Archivist, and your dice trick.”

“Really, now?” Juno Zeta looked up from her own game, advanced to the point of wrecking her unfortunate team member. “That’s 5 points for me, I’m afraid, Scholar. Anyway, I wouldn’t have gotten something that interesting out of my little trick; that’s decidedly more elaborate, for one, and less practical, for another. Given how small and repeated some of the points of contact would be, how do you keep a game straight? That’d be noisy as hell.”

“Practice, mostly. I sort of…Find an interesting point in the course of the game, and work backwards. Openings are easy to recognize, since their numbers are more limited, but that has the disadvantage of them being used more often, which just makes it harder to identify one particular point of time. So I don’t use them much,” he answered, with a clear satisfaction. “Your contribution was more getting me to think about the game pieces as, well — objects to consider, psychometrically. About the way their movements form parts of the game.”

“…Juno, what dice trick is this?” Asked her opponent. Which suddenly reminded Juno that she was, in fact, in the middle of a game, surrounded by people. 

“Don’t you —!” Juno rose up out of her seat — like Palamedes was some wild animal she could put back into its cage, or a bomb she could jump on. 

“Oh, she likes to use psychometry on dice, to identify the natural flaws in the makeup of their weights. It’s not as if every die is or remains perfectly balanced, right? She uses that to tell what numbers any given die is most likely to roll. The odds usually have only the most minute differences, naturally, so it’d be hard to call it cheating,” Palamedes explained, very lightly — with a wicked gleam in his eyes, she was sure of it.

“Juno Zeta!” cried her opponent in mock-horror. “And all this time, I thought you just thought some dice were lucky!”

“How dare.” She recoiled with an exaggerated flinch. “How cruel an insult is this, and what have I ever done to deserve it? I am an innocent and rational actor, simply tracking statistical probabilities!” Her gaze focused on the ungrateful boy, who had his eyebrows quirked. “How could you ruin my credibility like this, child?”

“How will your reputation survive this blow,” he murmured with all the feeling of a rock.

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth! I gave you a perfectly good trick and you use it against me. Without even using it against me in a literal sense, that would at least display the trick to advantage.” This appeared to be her limit — the truth began to bubble up between her words, and she was wholly helpless to prevent it.  It had started as a smile, and now burst like a cloud, a whole laugh from her stomach, over which she struggled to add, “Of course, you realize this means war, young man.”

“Oh, show her. She thinks she can be cleverer than us and cheat,” cried Julia, jostling the boy to rise. The whole team were grinning like maniacs at the show about to begin.

“Very well. I’ll hold nothing back.” He rose with a showman’s slow grandeur, letting his robes swish around him dramatically. He took a seat on the big couch, which practically swallowed him alive. This made it very hard for her to wipe the game board clean over her laughing.

They traded games, and he got pulled into another, lower-stakes one with the broader group, before he looked at a clockwork and realized they all had work or studies or activities in the morning, and the meeting broke up.

As he and Camilla walked down the nearly-deserted hallway, Juno leaned in the doorway and watched them go. They were practically falling against each other, exhausted. Still, she saw in their walk’s slowness, in the length of their strides, a sort of shine. The tension and nerves — the awkward, gawky impatience of the boy earlier in the evening — had unwound and steadied, until they almost seemed taller walking out than they did walking in.

She smiled in the private satisfaction of victory, standing on the threshold — there went her student, the Master Warden.

Chapter Text

By comparison, the actual announcement was somewhat anticlimactic. With it came all the preparations, the ceremonial robes to be tailored, the need for keynote speakers to give speeches — Juno Zeta got a spot for one as his mentor, which was nice. The day of ceremonies approached at once very quickly and very slowly.

When it finally was time, Juno Zeta smelled something a little suspect in the wind. It wasn’t as if he was running late — servitors were still setting up chairs and only a few of the speakers had finished getting ready and were milling about the sides of the stage. But he was not early, and he’d been out early for Camilla’s cavalier ceremony yesterday. (He’d insisted on the order of ceremonies. Normally, the Sixth did not let kids be cavaliers, even when the application had been accepted and the exams passed — but if it was the Master Warden, it was different. He’d wanted Camilla to be on stage with him when he accepted the title.)

“I’ll just go pop in,” she decided, because she was curious, anyway — and everyone was being very boring around the stage, just chatting about who would be sending representatives in the coming days — but Juno had already looked into that: The Third, the Fifth, and the Second; the Fourth had sent a letter that Palamedes said had wanting composition, but then, the Baron of Tisis was seven; The Seventh had sent a big bundle of flowers that had gotten held up in Importation, and a smaller stack of books and a letter on top, all wrapped in an embroidered ribbon — which was not remotely official; The Eighth would not have sent a representative if they’d been paid to do so; the Ninth had gone very quiet in the last decade or so, even by Ninth standards, and it was about half-plausible they were all dead and the supply shuttles were just being requested automatically. They hadn’t even sent a letter. No one had any gossip about that, and that made the gossip about who’d be in the audience a little dull. So, she knocked on the changing room door. It was Camilla who opened it.

“Hello. He’s forgotten how standing works,” she reported to Juno, dry and calm as a bone.

“Don’t say it like thaaaaaaaat!” Palamedes wailed until his voice cracked in three different ways. “Shit! What if that happens on stage?”

“How should she say it, then?” Juno entered the room — he was actually mostly prepared, it seemed, in his new robes of office, the long sleeves with their crescent cut-outs lashing when he turned on his heels to go another way. The dressing room was a small chamber, with little more than a clothes-rack, a dressing-table, a mirror, and a few chairs; his pacing gave it the dimensions of an animal’s cage.

“It’s not that I’m forgetting how standing works, it’s just — there’s the optics to consider! What am I supposed to do with my arms? What do people do with their arms when they’re standing and looking dignified? What do people do with their arms? How do people look when they stand, normally? Why do we have limbs if we never know what to do with them?” His chest heaved under his robes in the short, staccato pants of a dying animal. “ Doing something, I’m well prepared for, but just stand there and sign a form? In this economy? They’re all going to laugh!” He nearly pulled out his hair in the waves of angst he was experiencing, except Camilla was standing there with the hairbrush — not unlike a knife. Under her glare, he only took off his glasses and polished them furiously with a handkerchief.

“The joke would be on them, then; they knew they were getting an adolescent when they agreed to it.”

“Archivist Zeta, I’m a head of state! God, I’m a head of state!” Palamedes moved faster, his face contorting into a grimace of horror. “They’re going to be laughing beyond the star system! The Third will be laughing for months, which I remind you, is according to your system of cultural relativistic time, is an eternity’s worth of scathing political cartoons!”

“They’re already doing that,” she pointed out, unable to resist the smile. She knew full well he’d considered that before he’d agreed to it. Camilla was giving her a Look that said ‘do not make this harder than it has to be,’ which made it so funny she burst out laughing. “I’ve already ordered my favorite to be printed for my desk! You’re a baby whose entire face is a nose and glasses in that one. The resemblance is very authentic!”

“I am running away,” Palamedes decided then and there, the manic energy dropping out of him at this cruelty. “I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the cosmos as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this House.”

“Without me?” Camilla asked, unconcerned. “Then I’m packing my own little rucksack.”

“Don’t be silly. We are one flesh. You are my end.” He waved a finger as if in demonstration of some basic facts. Then he flopped into a chair, saying, “Ergo, it’s not violating the tenets of lone vagabond — is there a suitable gerund for this? Vagabonding? That sounds like it should be a fake word, even if it is real.” 

“Vagrancy?” asked Camilla as she went to re-apply the brush to his mussed hair.

 “No, Vagrancy has the wrong ring, I don’t want vagrancy, and I’d also rather not have demeaning cartoons of myself in frames! I don’t want to be laughed at forever!” Palamedes leaned forward to insist, which made Juno laugh again.

“Just laugh with them. Dignity is too costly to maintain all the time; it’s so much worse when it fails. When you are an adult, you must put away childish things — including the fear of being seen as childish.” As his teacher gave entirely true advice, he drummed his fingers against each other — at this conclusion, he settled back and let Camilla brush his hair back into order.  “But, if it will console the Master Warden, I promise that my speech will feature no embarrassing childhood anecdotes.”

“Was it going to?”

“Who knows, I’m winging this one,” she admitted. Oh, she had a rough outline, but she hated writing a script out, word-for-word; it made everything she said sound fake. “Actually, is that the first time anyone’s used the title for you just yet?”

Palamades smirked at that, shaking his head slowly as he rose to his feet. He told her, “I’m afraid you’re already well past beaten to the punch.”

“I’ve been calling him that for weeks,” said Camilla, who put down the brush like she was sheathing a sword, her task complete. “I don’t want anyone to forget what he’s earned. Ever.”

Juno Zeta highly doubted anyone would — at least, not when he was done with the universe. They were as ready as they would ever be.

The auditorium filled up; It was being broadcast closed-circuit throughout the Library for those unable to cram themselves into the hall. The Oversight Body all assembled in their most somber and pompous grays, layered with gray stoles of high learning and academic hoods. They mostly gave the usual speeches, something-something, tradition and advancement, something-something. The intense genericness might have come as an incredible relief to the young Master Warden — even if he showed no sign of relief or panic, and he remembered how standing worked. Juno’s was less generic, though she did steer clear of embarrassing stories. With Camilla a perfect half-step behind, Palamedes Sextus stabbed his finger and drew the blood into the nib of his pen; he signed in blood the ancient contract that bound House to Emperor and Warden to House.

Juno couldn’t help but look out over the crowd at that — Lykomedes in the front row was a hysterical sight, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief with increasingly frantic, furtive gestures. Absolutely maudlin. The flashing lights of cameras and lithograph-makers turned the auditorium into a field of rapidly-dying stars. And the mass of gray figures, like an amorphous and watchful cloud. The fluttery, hushed clapping of the Sixth House — the briefest touch of fingertips to palm — had more mass than volume.  And then it was time for a speech or two more, including one by the new Master Warden himself. 

He told them, “You have entrusted to me the greatest of treasures: the Library we’ve devoted our minds and souls; With it, you’ve granted me the faith of the skeptic and the passions of the reasoned, and, most of precious of all, each and every one of you. I will take you in my hands, and I will show you how much greater still these treasures can be,” and he probably even believed it. And then they bestowed upon the boy the symbols of his office. The pen he’d signed his name with, still darkly dotted with his blood. A small silver chain, clipped to the catches of his robe. She personally draped over his shoulders the stole of office, a garment that faded from a charcoal gray center to pale gray ends.  

There followed the traditional academic dinner, complete with several more speeches and the difficult task that faced every new Master Warden: everyone coming with their research proposals, well-advised and ill-advised, looking for just a moment of his time. If they’d expected an easy master, they were wrong. He would listen openly, and he would respond with a series of corrections, suggestions, and ideas for improvement that they really should attend to before submitting it through the appropriate channels. Some of them had walked away looking as if he’d personally told them a beloved childhood pet had to die for the greater good, like in a Seventh House children’s novel. Good boy.

He settled into the job, into the daily work of wrangling the departments to keep them from chewing each other’s heads off or exploding the installation; the meetings, paperwork, meetings about the paperwork, and meetings about the meetings about the paperwork, and so on. There was research to be done, too — both for his private purposes and for the House’s publications. Sometimes, his efforts succeeded: he spearheaded the first real reforms of the Swordsman’s Spire in half a millennium.

“We cannot rely on hazy and broad metrics like genetic outreach and a superficial ‘competency,’” he explained at the meeting that started that effort. And: “That leaves our soldiers undertrained and our attempts at securing alternate genetic sources tied inevitably to the cohort — why are we even coupling these two things? It might be efficient, but it’s limiting our options.”

Honestly, no one had really thought about how trained their soldiers were or not — which was probably the problem, and why, when she was 15, Camilla Hect was able to handily best the entire Swordsman’s Spire with a pair of short-swords.

Less successful were his plans, which were numerous, for modernizing the exterior cleaning system — for one thing, because he wanted a specialist from the Ninth to look at the skeletal constructs, and this would involve inviting people to look at Facility Engineering, which had the whole department trying to scare him off the idea. But things were changing.

For one, Juno Zeta’s long-awaited seat finally opened up. It was gratifying that the position of her protégé did not make anyone call out nepotism when she was awarded the title of Master Archivist. She had earned it so long ago — it made the acknowledgement from herself almost stale, and it made the acknowledgement from the House a little refreshing. The Master Warden had awarded her the title and an achievement plaque with a smug little smile and commented, “You ought to have had this years ago, but I’m happy to be the one handing you this, for all the times you’ve done the same. Maybe now, we can just pass honors back and forth.” She told him that she’d be sure the next one came with something useful, like stationery.

Her office didn’t entirely miss having him coming in for the occasional lesson or help with some assignment — in part because, while he was no one’s protégé at this phase, he did sometimes come in with a task, or a problem he needed talking out, or even a solution he was excited about — when he’d worked out a necromantic drain for Dulcinea Septimus, made by extending her own epithelial tissue, he came spinning into the office nearly laughing with the thrill of the hunt. He’d gotten very tall by then, at about 15, and had scooped Juno up in a sudden excitement that very nearly caused him to topple over. She was honestly irrelevant to that success, except by way of being a rubber duck.

She felt more accomplished when, around the same time, he asked for her help with something to gift the new Lady of Koniortos Court, who was easier to shop for than most Heads of Houses: she had studied at the Sixth when Palamedes was very small, and the Master Archivist pitied her for having to be so distracted from her still-unpublished great work. Juno spent a few weeks at the Warden’s request working out from Pent’s existing publications what documents Abigail Pent would have been able to take copies of back to the Fifth. From that, they were able to find a supplement to act as a welcoming gift — a fascinating little Lyctoral record, which asked if everyone could please lend the author their ring tabs. It was one of those notes which went so far around the bend of hilariously simple that it reached mystifying.

“I really hope she figures out if it actually means the ones you get on cans, or if there was a different object by that term back then; I don’t credit that being allegorical. I hope the answer’s stupid, because wouldn’t that be brilliant?” Juno had said when she’d produced the very careful, very exacting copies to send. They’d considered the note they had recovered from the Sex Study, but that was a bridge too far.

And time passed; the kids grew up. For Palamedes, up was very much the key word; he never did fill out beyond simply getting taller, until he was taller than Juno herself — and dwarfed his father by at least 10 cm. He honed his necromancy to a scalpel-sharpness, and with a great deal of finesse — which had the handy bonus that more of his handkerchiefs got pressed to clean his lenses than to wipe off blood sweat; not that he never pushed himself too far, but it was definitely less frequent. Which must have been a relief to Camilla. Who cut her hair to a hard edge that matched the rest of her: a sharp edge on a hard, bold line. Tall, but not as tall as Juno; long-limbed, but solid with lean muscle rather than willowy. She did not use her cavaliership, or her ability to beat the entirety of the Swordsman’s Spire, to neglect her scholarship — which was as much a relief to the Master Archivist as to her more immediate family. Juno did not know exactly when it had become gratifying to see Camilla make Scholar — it had snuck up on her.

Master Archivist Juno Zeta changed very little with time. She acquired an additional stripe on the hood of her formal robes — but as she almost never wore those, not even when she was at a function. She had a closet full of identical robes, which she only very rarely changed, and she liked it that way. Perhaps a bit more of her hair grayed at the back. That was all.

One morning late in the penmyriadic year of Our Lord — Kindly Prince of Death, etc — Juno Zeta regretted the series of life decisions that led to her son being Master Warden of the Library. It was easy to regret any sequence of life decisions when you were in a meeting which could have been a memo, and your own intended topic for said meeting was still sitting in your documents bag, at your feet, not being discussed, for well over an hour.

It was also easy, if a little self-centered, to regret any series of life decisions you’d made when the Master Warden was in Some Kind of Mood. Its precise nature was difficult to discern — his face was ordinary, if on the stressed and intent side. His eyes were a little puffy, perhaps, the whites marked with little spidery red capillaries. His clothes were extra rumpled. He tapped pens, he capped and uncapped them, he adjusted his glasses until the arms and the nose-guards were out of alignment and they sat nearly diagonal, that tic of his boyhood that she hadn’t seen him do in years.

He spent the entire meeting so lost in the weeds he probably intended some sort of camping trip out there, or perhaps a hermitage. They’d gotten to the first item on the day’s agenda — this wasn’t even an Oversight Body meeting, just one between the Master Warden and major members of the Repository, Incunabula, Archeology, Circulation, and Archives departments. It was about holding some sort of Myriadic Exhibition — and he’d gone into it with a fine-tooth comb, asking about everything, pondering, arguing for or against points he mostly made himself, wandering off only to wander back on. She was half-convinced as she drummed her fingers on the table that he would, at any minute, start taking the poor junior Archeo who’d proposed an addition to the plan to task for their punctuation. It was bizarre, if only because the Master Warden usually only got like this about his own ideas. Throughout the meeting, Camilla kept looking at him with an expression of — well, nothing, actually, but she was looking at him with it so often that Juno couldn’t help but read some mix of concern and annoyance into it.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it was time to close the meeting, having only debated some millions of points about this one particular exhibit. If it hadn’t been for the biscuits and coffee, they would have rioted. As it was, they dispersed through the Administrative Section full of grumbles.

The Master Archivist trudged, carrying her sadly unopened documents bag, up the nearest stairwell towards her office.  She turned to ascend the last flight when she spotted the Master Warden and his Hand conferring at the far end of the landing, shortly before it opened up to the main thoroughfare. She hung back to shamelessly eavesdrop.

“— T ruly fine, Cam. I’ll be fine,” Palamedes was insisting, “they’re waiting for you at the spire, and I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t let this interfere with our day-to-day.”

“You agreed to that. I didn’t.” She reached over for his hand, and his attempt at evading didn’t prevail. “If I went, what would you do?”

“I don’t know, but I promise I will find something.” From a distance, it was hard to tell if the expression he reached up to cover was very irritated or very sad — if the crisscrossing line made by his brows lifted or collapsed down onto him. “But is today being normal too much to ask?”

“I’d hardly call getting your heart broken normal, Warden.” She looked up, and perhaps from her vantage she could see better what his mouth was doing, because she did not move. More softly, she added, “Do you promise you won’t just go over the letter again?”

“I promise I will find something else to think about for a while.” He lowered his hand and adjusted his glasses back into place.  

“OK,” said Camilla. She tugged his hand, pulling him minutely closer. His head followed that momentum, tipping gently down and forward. Their foreheads came together, and they huddled as if under a storm, or as if that way, still and quiet, something could be carried from her to him — or him to her — shared out between them.

Eventually, and as if on a cue, they parted.

“I meant it,” Camilla said. “I’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll keep myself busy until then,” he reassured her. But once she was gone, his shoulders stooped and his body sagged between them like an old sack. This seemed like a good moment to make her presence known and offer a little assistance — and get what she’d missed in that meeting.

“Master Warden — I didn’t want to interrupt, but now that you’re finished with your conversation, do you have a minute?”  She hurried up to him. He turned back with an expression of mild dismay. Part annoyance, part embarrassment.

“How much of that did you hear?”

“Oh, only starting from the part where you said you were fine. I take it that’s an optimistic report?”

“Somewhat; the situation’s stable, which is fine as can be expected. But if you heard all that, you know I am hunting for a way to spend two hours. I am entirely at your service,” he answered, sighing in the inevitable acceptance of the fact that keeping a situation’s existence hidden was a non-starter. He even produced a smirk, like he’d had to rummage around his pockets for it like a handkerchief.

“I don’t know about two hours, but I was hoping to talk to you about some modifications to the archives, and I’ve got a few acquisitions that Archeo says ought to be theirs, but they say that about everything, and I’m not letting them get their greedy mitts all over these prints, even if they do have dried organics in them. They’re a beautiful collection of pressed and preserved organics — flowers and other plant life, insects, cross-sections of organs — beautiful, really, they maintained their shape splendidly — laminated into the pages of a book. Oh, but I’m rambling — my point is, I want you to look at them before you decide whose dominion they ought to be under, and if you don’t stop me, I will go on!” He did not seem inclined to stop her — he had a far-away and lonely look to his eyes. Juno pushed at the knobbles of his spine, right between his shoulders blades, to spur him onward. 

“Oh, yes, right, that sounds interesting. Have you determined how they did the pressing?” He said it in a way which was almost like he was paying attention.

“Nothing confirmable just yet; I’ve got a few hypotheses that I’m preparing to test out, of course. The trick is, most of them take quite a while to see if they’d produce results, but that’s preservation for you! If I find out, Archeo can have that, if they want.” She walked hurriedly on, leaving the boy to drift in her wake. Once he’d begun moving, momentum kicked in, and a Warden in motion remained in motion all the way down to the archives.

He did brighten up while looking at the specimens. They were works of artistry, and the preservation was immaculate enough to make them interesting on multiple levels. But when he got to a pressed network of bronchi, arranged with little white flowers Juno had identified as baby’s breath — someone had had a joke with that one — his eyes crinkled softly and sadly at the corners, and he stared silently at it for a little too long.

“Warden,” she asked as she marked something down on a bit of associated paperwork. “…What is going on? What happened?”

He brought the book closed with the great deal of care that the delicacy of the pages merited. He seemed to consider many things he could say, running his gloved hand over his face and tugging at the features, as if he could rearrange them into something more — appropriate? Concealing?

“I asked Dulcinea to marry me; yesterday, I got her response. She said…that she couldn’t. And that she was sorry.” He dropped his hand away and looked down at the closed book. His eyes were ice, crushed underfoot and shattering. Though Juno hadn’t asked — she hadn’t picked herself up from the shock — he automatically added, “I understand, of course, and she has — every right to refuse an offer she didn’t want, or, or, that would add to her burden. I understand.”

She peered at his face, looking for any uptick of the mouth or quirk of the brows, any mirthful twinkle of the eyes that would make more sense than a — a hairbrained suggestion. But it wouldn’t have been in keeping with the facts: Palamedes Sextus didn’t lie. And Imperial Law didn’t bend.

“You couldn’t have thought this would work — no offense, I mean it only as a matter of practicality,” she murmured. She didn’t find humor or falsehood in his face, but something else — the twist of his mouth, like someone trying to draw themselves up to shout with their full lungs. Or like someone trying to keep from collapsing. It was a look of defeat. It was a look of failure. She tilted her head and asked from the only conclusion she could think of: That their years of impossible work were now, at last, over. “Did you want to be rejected? So you’d have to let go of her and admit the truth?”

The boy who had never before failed on anything more important than pushing plans through committee smiled at her — or he made the effort, anyway.

“You’ve confused your cause and effect,” he said lightly. Then, all the lightness falling out and crumbling: “It’s because I admitted it that I had to ask.”

Palamedes bent down and produced a handkerchief — and that would have been appropriate, except he started to polish his glasses with them. And he whispered to his thick lenses and the industrious handkerchief, “I just wanted to hold her hand at the end.”

 Juno Zeta restlessly flipped a page so the rustle could make noise.

“I’m sorry,” she said, after what might have been twenty years, “for misjudging your intentions. I take it you’d rather not have advice or reminders about old warnings.” She felt as though she could pull a million tools out of the toolbox, and every single one of them would be wildly inappropriate. She didn’t doubt that he knew it all — knew everything she could have said about the reasons it never could have worked, the myriad of reasons, all fair and valid, the Duchess might have had to refuse. That wish was too simple; nothing could leave any mark on it.

“Yes. Thank you for refraining,” he answered. For a moment, he stood as if adrift, like the engine powering him had gone very briefly dead, with his eyes detached from anything in a visible distance — looking at nothing.

“Anyway, I’d like to show you the area we’d want to expand the archives into.” She opened the blueprints she’d been working from directly before his face, pointing out a particular section of rooms that, at the moment, were classrooms. “But you can see where we’d need Facility Engineering on-board for this, with the bulkhead, and we’d need to hook up those vents to our climate-control system.”

Palamedes jolted back to this moment, away from some now forever-distant deathbed, and furrowed his brow.

“You’d also need quite a few departments to hand over the rooms,” he said, but he could see the point of it. They were able to talk about what sort of committee this would call for, and what they could leverage if they were afforded the space. It ate the time in steady little nibbles, made it digestible, until it was about time for Camilla to return.

“Off I go, then; propose your request at the next meeting,” he advised. Then he moved in one great abruptness — not away from her, but toward — and swept his arms around her. “…Thank you for occupying me for a while.”

Juno hesitated — where to put her arms? Where did people put their arms? — before wrapping them around his twiggy, brittle form. His head drooped down to rest on top of her shoulder as if he were setting down a heavy burden. A brief, explosive burst of breath shook his chest and shoulders — too little to be a sob, too much to be a sigh. 

“It was useful all-around, Palamedes,” she told him, gently. 

Then the Master Warden disentangled himself and gave a series of quick, jerky nods.

“Right. Thank you again,” he said before he headed out.

The subject of the Duchess never did come up again — but she also knew that perhaps no news was the best news possible. Juno probably would not hear another word about their situation, whatever it was, until Dulcinea Septimus was dead.

When the Emperor’s summons came, they took a vote about whether or not to send the Master Warden and his cavalier, but it was mostly a formality. They couldn’t not send the first investigation into the First House’s physical remains in centuries. There was not a grand seeing-off, no pomp or ceremony. That was for when there was data to chew over. There would be findings. So they far more anticipated his homecoming than fussed about the departure. She didn’t even see him off outside of the last planning meeting.

His homecoming was two boxes: one empty, the other only mostly empty, littered with scraps of char and bone.

Chapter Text

They were his. It was him. DNA, thanergenic links, it was all consistent. He had been rendered down to fragments, 81 of which yawned before her in a box on the Oversight Body conference table.

“…What now?” someone asked, their tone hollow and flat.

Juno Zeta stood staring at the scraps of char and bone which had once been a brilliant young man; that had once been an overreaching, ambitious child; that had once been an odd and distracted toddler. That had once been — 20 years which she remembered as a moment ago — a wrinkled infant that had looked like a heron’s naked chick. 

She could not have put words to what she felt — she couldn’t even breathe what she felt. As she looked at the box, it stopped being a box, the tarry charcoal stopped being flesh, like when you’d been staring at writing, the same writing you’d been staring at all night, and suddenly the words stopped meaning anything at all. How did people even understand something from the shapes? They were just ink, they were all just lines — it was all just an arrangement of atoms, none of it was anything, it was all a nonsense that they mistook for reality. How did she trust the chemicals in her brain to tell her they were chemicals?

People were using air, pumped through the lungs through an arrangement of chords in their throats to produce waveform patterns that reached the specialized membranes and the ossicles in her ears, the smallest bones in the body — though, this was not true, the smallest bones were bones that had been broken down smaller, into 81 shards — and she took what felt like a lifetime to understand that this meant they were speaking words, words she understood, they were saying something. To her.

“What?” She asked, her voice tight and breathless. That forced her to breathe, forced her to blink, and the tears came strange and hot, and she did not understand them at all. “Can you repeat that?”

“Master Archivist,” said Melchior Hexadecimal with a gentleness that felt absurd, “Are you alright? We understand your loss.”

“Me? I’m fine.” She sank down into the chair behind her, still staring. “I’m not the one in 81 pieces in a box.” This felt like it wasn’t remotely true.

So, she was glad when the meeting took a thirty-minute recess. She remembered how to breathe — the process was a hollow ache.

And she thought about the boxes. The longer she thought, the stranger it felt — not that the bones and fragments in one of the little gray boxes were not real, or that they were not the fragments of her dead student, who somehow she’d managed to outlive. But like they’d cut to black suddenly — there one moment, gone the next, covered by a few empty words.

She caught sight of Kiana Zesde, who was also staring at the two little boxes and similarly tear-stained. Her mouth had curved into a strange sort of frown, like someone working at something that required a lot of fine precision — and whose hands were shaking.  When she looked up and caught Zeta’s eyes with her own — browner than her half-sisters, but gray-tinged closest to the pupil — she let out a sigh.

“It’s probably shock. Or denial,” Kiana said, slowly. The words were strained, but they still had little lumps of feeling in them, like pulp. “…But I just can’t believe. That she’d…” She shrugged and gestured to the box.

Juno Zeta might have been in shock or denial herself — but feeling sparked back into her. She stood back up and looked at the empty box. The thanergy explosion had most likely been self-inflicted; it was consistent with the evidence as to its point of origin — the pieces were from all sorts of bits of him, without the explosion having favored (if such a word was applicable) any one part of the body as the ignition point. A simultaneous shattering of an entire necromancer that left behind only little fragments. Palamedes Sextus’ body mass had been mostly skeletal, anyway, and so it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to have recovered much of it. Those 81 pieces all amounted to a few grams, with no one piece larger than her thumb. It would have taken a tremendous recovery effort on the cohort’s part — but one they could make. But only for Palamedes Sextus.

What did an unrecoverable corpse look like?

“That she’d die and leave no corpse, and the Master Warden would leave a body like that ?”

“…Not what I was thinking,” Kiana admitted — but her eyebrows went up, and her mouth smoothed into a firm line. “Now I am.”

When the meeting re-assembled, it was now other people’s turn to stare. Juno Zeta smiled at them cheerfully from her spot, her hands already writing something down on a sheet of flimsy.

“What we do now is nothing,” she announced. “We don’t proceed with interment or producing new Master Warden exams at least until the proper six-month period of mourning has been observed, and after that, we’ll prepare something suitable. The Master Warden never made burial plans to my knowledge, which was obnoxious of him, but I think he’d probably at least want a nicely etched little plaque to go with it.” There was only one part of this statement that seemed like it made sense. The table muttered in a dazed confusion, hit by first one hurricane and then another, spinning in totally different directions.

“What, delay getting a replacement out of — sentiment?” came the slightly peevish voice of Icara Sexaginta.

“If my thinking is biased, so’s yours. We all remember how put-out you were to be beaten by a thirteen-year-old. You’ve already waited seven years, and you’ll probably wait a lot longer than that, so what’s a few more months?” Zeta said with a bright smile, verbally taking off at a brisk pace while everyone else floundered to find their footing. 

“Wha? How dare — face the facts, Master Archivist!”

“I am facing them. I’m not disputing that Palamedes Sextus is dead. But…I don’t think Camilla The Sixth is. People who are dead usually leave corpses, in case you’ve forgotten your lessons; it’s nearly an automatic confirmation of death, there being a corpse — one they’d want us to have, if only it existed. Now, on the other hand, I don’t know why she’d be alive and let him die; not unless there was something else going on, something we’re not being told. That means we’re not in possession of all the facts.” She leaned forward onto the table — and the steel of her eyes gave a knife-blade flash, the mad twinkle of a great machine flashing as its wheels spun faster and faster until it was just a blur of metal. It magnetized the entire room to lean closer in anticipation. She clapped her hands together once, eagerly. “I want to know what those kids were thinking before we shut the book, don’t you? I think we’ll get it if we wait. All in favor?”

Hands went up. Camilla’s fathers’ hands shot up; her sister’s had been lifted to chest-height from around the time Zeta had clapped. The others moved at their own paces, slowly at first, and then with the gratifying inevitability of an avalanche.

Over the next few months, they still did try to conduct the business of memorializing a Master Warden. Juno led those meetings, working out funeral arrangements for the lonely little box of homemade cremains. She’d have them go through pages and pages of his work, looking for a good quote — one that she could recall standing out to her some years ago, but was it there? Was it in another paper? What did they think about “How much greater they all can be,” from his inauguration? Too simple?

Once they’d wrestled with all that, for hours or days, she’d wake up and, just as they were nearing completion, announce “Oh, you know, I just thought of something else!” In a single night, she unpicked the fabric of ideas she’d woven in the preceding weeks. It wasn’t easy, but she could keep it up as long as she had to.

What was strange was that, eventually, she didn’t have to. Even when six months turned into very nearly a year, no one brought up replacement exams. Everyone was waiting — it had spread like a mold infecting the whole House.

Somehow, it felt like the longer they were waiting, the less people doubted that they were waiting for something; something that would happen. Maybe it was a sort of denial, a refusal to believe their boy wonder would have just died, that this strange comet would have hit something in its path and fallen into a sun. Maybe it was that every time someone had bet against Palamedes Sextus, he’d blown them all away. She so badly wanted to see that smug little punk’s trick this time.

After ten months, even Juno had to admit that she was starting to get impatient. And it was exam season, everyone was home! The timing would have been perfect. But then, Dominicus flared. It flickered. The whole station held its breath, brought up its extra emergency heat shielding, dumped all their capacities into just keeping the temperature livable, and waited.

In the days that followed, someone came skidding into the Archives Department.

“Master Archivist!” called a Scholar so breathless they might well have run through the entire facility shouting the news. Someone had nevertheless taken the time to give this poor gofer one of the magenta emergency meeting request forms. “Camilla the Sixth just docked in Bay Four!”

Zeta didn’t care how breathless it would leave her; she ran pell-mell down the halls, up several tiers, and all the way to the docking bay — knocking over at least three carts, a potted plant under a grow lamp, a skeleton construct, and one unfortunate Dock Technician.

And she still arrived behind an absolute crowd of people, all crammed around the entrance of the shuttle dock, threatening a human crush event. Camilla Hect wasn’t even visible from the back of the mass, just the ripple of the crowd to give her space. Because she had knives, probably — knives or answers, and either of them were prepared to cut.   The ripples reached further and further back, until at last she appeared in a little parted pool with her sister.

Camilla Hect had lost weight, turning her cheekbones into blades. Her gray robe showed a great deal of careful mending and stains that washing now had only dimmed and faded. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of banged-up dark glasses that sat crookedly on her face. But however difficult the months had been, she did not move like someone who had lost her best friend since she was five years old — as purposeful and graceful as ever. She paused mid-motion when she spotted Juno, tense as an animal weighing fight and flight, like she anticipated — what? Tears? A thorough scolding?

“Well, you took your time, Warden’s Hand.” Juno approached lightly, smiling in a mingled relief and amusement. “I’ve still won the office betting pool, so I might find it in me to forgive, if your explanation’s good enough.”

“We got hung up,” the cavalier answered, shrugging back into motion. “We need to talk about the Warden. Somewhere private.”

Juno Zeta honestly could not have waited a minute longer than necessary, so they went to her apartment — it was closer than the Master Warden’s chambers or either of their offices. By the time the door had shut and been locked, she was about ready to burst with excitement.

“Alright, tell me the details. I’ve been trying to figure out his plan for months now. He was very lucky he’d never left funerary plans, or I’d have had to put a stop to those; But of course he didn’t, the young always think they’re invincible, before they apparently explode.”

 “He didn’t think it’d take this long,” Camilla answered without taking offense. She removed the sunglasses she’d come in with, set them aside onto the coffee table, and looked back at Juno with Palamedes Sextus’ brilliantly gray eyes.

“Oh,” Juno said, her breath taken out of her chest in a single sweep. There were times you heard about this phenomenon in possession theory, but not with the original spirit still in control of the body in question — and she didn’t think he would have displaced Camilla and then imitated her to her own half-sister. Which meant this was a different type of theory altogether. “This is some absolutely astonishing spiritual jury-rigging, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Camilla shifted her weight to the balls of her feet. “We can switch, but it’s limited.”

“Limited in effect — God knows how that’d work, but God knows how any of this works — or in duration?”

“Spirit displacement would begin past a point.” She fished from a pants pocket a clockwork, one of the sort with a stopwatch, displaying it to make her point for her. The timer was in minutes, rather than hours. “It might take a minute to call him. We’re working on that.”

 “Why the private show, then? I’m guessing you’ll demonstrate this at the meeting, and it’d make sense to conserve resources, if it’s that brief.” It wasn’t to build support, since she’d have supported whatever Camilla could prove to her satisfaction, but Juno Zeta was not sure exactly what other purpose a private caucus would serve. Camilla just gave her the sort of look that said that she loved and respected you, but respectfully, you were being a bit stupid, and she should have expected this.

“He’d want to talk to you.” That was all her preamble out of the way, it seemed, because she abruptly sat down in a chair. “I’ll get him.” She shut her eyes. After a minute in which nothing happened, Juno cleared her throat — and Camilla held up a hand crossly. Juno prodded her no further, only tapped her foot in anticipation. Camilla’s hand lowered.

A moment after that, she went very still — stiller than Camilla had ever been as far as Juno could recall. Her head dipped and then jerked abruptly back up, as if she’d started to nod off and caught herself back awake. Her eyes opened and blinked a few times, quickly.

And they were Camilla Hect’s eyes again, an earthy brown-gray, capable of looking, at times like now, arrestingly dark. But the walls of Camilla Hect’s ordinary expression had dropped so the eyes could rove around the room as if she’d been carried there in her sleep; they took in clutter, notes, a coffee cup resting on top of a pile of notebooks with one note covering the mug, the squishy chairs, the two dead lights in her ceiling. Strung on a different face than she normally saw the expression, it occurred to Juno that it was one of hers: the same restless observations, the same upward tip of the mouth which was not quite yet a smile, the same eyes open to devour with a stare.

“I see — I see we’ve arrived,” said Camilla’s voice, with a slight correction when the sound made the speaker start. The dark eyes glanced down at the clockwork still held in Camilla’s hand, and the fingers pressed down on the timer’s button. “There we go. Please tell me you’ve moved that mug in the last year, it’s in the same spot it was –”

“Oh, we don’t have time for that! You have to tell me all about how you’ve done this or I won’t be able to withstand the curiosity, Master Warden; you’ve had me guessing for months,” Juno burst out, interrupting what she had immediately recognized as Palamedes’ second-favorite anxiety-displacing behavior — the meandering ramble about a safer topic. He took the interruption by relying on his favorite displacement (good for any emotion): fidgeting with his glasses. Since Camilla was not wearing the sunglasses, or any glasses, he pushed nothing at all up the bridge of Camilla’s nose.

“Of course, Master Archivist. I’m sorry about the delays.” He stared at Camilla’s hand and clicked Camilla’s tongue in irritation as if the hand, in going to adjust glasses which did not exist, had wronged Camilla somehow.  “Events conspired to interrupt our plan, which hadn’t accounted for…Quite how messy circumstances became. The initial plan relied on a few observations about revenant theory: the creation, shortly in advance of my death, of multiple thanergenic links — to my own body, as a starting point.”

“Which you then proceeded to render down to scraps, so those wouldn’t hold up directly. But indirectly, you just end up in the River.”

“Right,” he said brightly, “So, immediately before I died, I created a localized bubble of normalized space-time within the River — you can impose your own self-awareness onto it, if you’re careful, and the River will bend around it — and it was easier for me to maintain my sense of self there, still attached to the thanergy links connecting to my body on the cellular level. That way, Cam could collect me with only a handful of pieces. Do you like ‘bubble’ as a term for this sort of River arrangement? A friend I made disputed me on it, but I still hold it’s the best analogy.”

Oh, he’d made a friend! It was a term he’d never used lightly, and it glowed a little to see that he had not outstripped the whole universe so extensively so as to leave himself and Camilla Hect standing all alone on the frontiers.

“Master Warden, if you’ve invented making bubbles in the River, you can go hang everyone who wants to argue with your choice in jargon. That’s what scholastic glory is all about. It’s intuitive. Go on.”

“Right, right. From there, it was a matter of getting a bone adept to make the pieces Camilla had into something I could move, to get around the inanimate revenant problem — which turned into a surprising ordeal, but that’s something Cam can cover better than I can — and from there, I possessed the bones as a Revenant.”

“And from there, to Camilla. But that doesn’t explain your eyes or the switching; that’s not how possession theory normally works.”

“Correct again,” he said, coming to a momentary pause. The space between Camilla’s brows knotted as he paused in the manner of someone doing some very important math, or weighing between two options which looked identical, but were actually a matter of life and death; as if he could strip away the superficial layers and find something essential beneath. He went to reach for his glasses, but they had not magically arrived on Camilla’s face, so he ran a hand through her hair instead. Once he’d finished the pretense that he’d planned that all along, really, he reached down to pick up the sunglasses from the coffee table. With a long exhalation, “I’m building on top of lyctoral theories of soul manipulation here, and the switch in eye colors is typical. I initially had thought that because Cam and I weren’t using the full process, it wouldn’t work that way, but it turned out where we were using — the extent to which we gave our souls to one another — was enough.”

“Why not the full process?” She had not honestly expected him to report much of what he’d learned at the House of the First. But if he were bringing it up, she’d press into that space with both shoulders. She expected him now to look cross again, but Palamedes Sextus only sighed with a worn-out, bitter little smile, like he’d expected her to ask, and shook his head.

“Because it’s not right. It’s not finished. They left it as a consumption, as murder — and called it sacred. There’s so much power in it, and it’s all a mistake. It’s horrible.” Palamedes’ curled his lip in a snarl that showed off some of Camilla’s teeth, his eyes lit from within with an enormous, cold fury: the winter stone coming to crush something.

“That would be a good reason to avoid it, I agree,” she said, jollying him along to take a seat again. After all, it wasn’t as if he could prevent the deaths that had happened, or the lyctors — Third and Ninth — who ascended, by being cranky about it now.

The boy who was cranky about it now did not take a seat, though. Instead, he opened his arms and swept her into a fierce hug. It was lung-crushing and all-encompassing, it had thrown all regret or concern to the wind and was just holding on for dear life to something that he didn’t want to let go of. After a moment’s thought, she brought one hand to his back and put the other hand on the back of his head, bringing Palamedes to rest it on her shoulder. She was taller than him in Camilla’s body, so he did not have to stoop the way he had before.

“God, I’ve missed talking to someone,” he muttered into her shoulder. “You know you’re the third person I’ve spoken to — a real conversation, where I’m not pretending to be Camilla or leaving notes — since I died?”

“…I can hardly imagine; I think I’d go insane,” it was softer than she normally might, less airy — as much sincerity as she could without flinching. He gave a slightly exasperated sigh, and she could imagine him rolling his eyes over her shoulder.

“Of course you would,” Palamedes said, very softly, painfully gentle. It was almost shyly that he added, “Mum… I’m home.”

“Welcome back, Palamedes.” 

They seperated, and in a more businesslike and hurried tone, he said, “Cam has my notes, and I’ll be back for the meeting, of course. Don’t share the notes too much. I repeat, they’ve got murder in them, so I don’t want you pollinating the entire Archives Department with them.

"Tell Camilla... Tell her... I don't know, really.” He smiled with a sort of helpless warmth, a dawning that on Camilla's face was normally over in an instant, but now was left to seep into every feature. "I'm just happy enough to finally be able to get a message to her that I keep wanting to say something."

"Yes, yes, I'll tell her you love her," Juno said with a flippant little wave of the hand. This brought him up short.

"This is apparently the second time people have decided to put those words in my mouth. Why do people keep saying that's what I said?"

"We're not stupid."

Right as he opened his mouth to give a rejoinder, the timer's beeping cut him off.

"Just tell her 'thank you,' alright? She knows everything else."

And then Camilla Hect’s face went briefly slack and the body tipped slightly forward, like the body’s blood pressure had dropped all at once. Then Camilla caught herself and blinked her suddenly bright, pale eyes to get her bearings.

“You talked?”

“Yes, that was very interesting! He sends his regards, or something in that vein, anyway.” She looked at Camilla closer, and caught a hunger in her eyes, the hard slate stolidity of her jaw. “…Does it take a lot out of you, even like this? It seems to be a precarious business, and I’d worry that it’s liable to tip.”

“We manage,” said Camilla Hect. And, feeling something else might be called for: “I get more than I lose.”

She supplied some of the notes, though, which even at a glance had outgrown Zeta’s understanding of soul manipulation by leaps and bounds. She was more than a little proud. And then Camilla was off to greet the rest of her family, and there would probably be a stop in the whirlwind tour preceding the meeting to tell Lykomedes that his son was only dead for certain definitions of dead.

Camilla Hect was standing in her usual position when everyone filed into the Oversight Body conference room — behind the right side of the empty chair of the Master Warden. On the table before it were folders of documents — not remotely an unusual sight, though without Palamedes Sextus’ array of pens that he put down and never picked back up, thus requiring another pen, it seemed somehow empty.

She had taken off the sunglasses, and those were laid out on the table, too; no one could ignore the change. Which only added to the tidal wave of questions that came rushing in, as everyone asked everything: “What happened?” “Has physical material been imported to the First House in recent centuries, or is the House preserved in some fashion?” “What’s the trick behind the remains we received? They were so authentic!”  “Was there a trick at all?” “They can’t be transplants — possession?” “Did the Master Warden leave a will?” “What took you so long?”

Until Camilla glared at them until they almost shut up. Someone still had to ask the person interested in the First House why they’d “ask that at a time like this, is all you care about your own pet theories?” but this was almost quiet by comparison.

“Stop.” Camilla brought the word down like a hammer. They stopped. “I have spent the last several months with an organization from outside the Houses, Blood of Eden. They had significant intelligence of the Sixth House, gained from the lyctor who founded the Library. Here.” She stepped to the side of the empty chair and began to pass down documents from the stack to the table.

Before they reached Juno, one fact jumped out — and was verified the moment her hands touched the copy-stamped paper. The texture was unmistakable. The structural designs of the House on the paper were very old — they contained only some of the oldest components of the Library. But it also contained things that strangers were not allowed to know, not when they were new and not ever since.

Camilla was still speaking, saying, “They cooperated — helped me come home, eventually. And…What I’m about to say cannot be told to any outsiders. The people on the shuttle and the people in Blood of Eden included. Understood?” They assented easily — who could resist a secret on the Sixth? So she continued quickly to, “I’m carrying the Warden’s spirit in my body. His time is limited, so I had to do the context. He can explain today’s business.”

Having watched the process before — which contained so little visible process as to look like nothing more than a moment’s pause — Juno turned her attention to the room. Her seat gave her a decent position midway down the table. Closer to its head, the more senior Masters strained forward like animals that caught a scent, too intent at unraveling what lay before them to speculate or voice confusion. Downtable, the Fellows and other miscellaneous board members were still trying to keep up, murmuring to themselves, craning for a look; a few were in a low-key argument about the possible range of meanings Camilla’s words offered. They were so caught up in the discussion that they almost missed the moment.

“It’s good to see you all again. I hope you won’t mind if I skip the pleasantries and present my credentials,” said Palamedes briskly. He took a small blank paper card from the collection of papers — they’d brought in so much paper — and held it up, clutched between his fingers. The air around his hand shimmered in a way it never could have for Camilla Hect, and the thanergy on the paper went wild with decay. It cracked and yellowed, it crumbled beneath the pressure of his hand as they watched. He crushed the fragments in his fist. As if sending off a kiss, he blew the dust that had once been a piece of paper out across the table — they were nothing more than a catch of light, motes in a sunbeam, before they vanished completely from sight. “I present the evidence that I am in fact the Master Warden Palamedes Sextus. Any questions?”

There were approximately a million, from every corner in the room. He might as well have announced that there was a bomb under the table. About the eyes — about Camilla — about his arrival –

“Why would you do that to a piece of paper?!” Hexadecimal nearly wailed. He’d put a veiny hand out across the table, as if in the vain hope of sweeping up any pieces. It was rare to see him lose composure. 

“It was completely blank and chosen for the purpose of the demonstration, I assure you. It’s astonishing just how much Blood of Eden had access to, they’re completely careless with it,” Palamedes answered, but he shifted his gaze to the side evasively, with a little twist of discomfort on his features. “As for the rest — the changes to Camilla’s and my eyes are an expected side-effect of the spiritual process which enables me to hold fast to her body this way. I’ve done some very interesting research for the past ten months or so, and I intend to elaborate — once everything else has been settled.” He turned his chair slightly and had nearly sat in it when Icara Sexaginta cleared her throat.

“Excuse me, but I think I must interrupt you, before we carry on this meeting,” she began, and affixed Palamedes with the satisfied air of a cat among canaries.

“My ‘any questions’ was mostly rhetorical, Master Scholar.”

“Your first responsibility must be to oversee the succession plan, if you’ve decided to return from the dead.”

“I don’t see why,” said Palamedes, in a tone of clearly baiting nonchalance.

“Aren’t you glad you got to come home to this?” Juno commented with a brow lifted in the Master Warden’s direction.

“Master Archivist, this is hardly the time for banter! This is a serious legal issue facing us!” Sexaginta banged the table, flushing in the face. She cleared her throat again. And, because hope apparently sprang eternal in her heart, said, “I remind you, Palamedes Sextus, that the dead do not continue to hold office. You don’t qualify.”

“Oh, are you sure?” He crowed.

“He does, though,” Juno pointed out airily, which did him the tiny little favor of covering the moment where the sound of Camilla’s voice raised, loud and exultant, clearly disoriented him as much as it did everyone else.

“Oh, my,” said the head of Agricultural Biology, whose eyebrows creeped up in the growing astonishment that he might be right.

Palamedes smiled savagely, which stretched Camilla’s face in a way wholly alien to her — the lips exposed every bit of teeth; the predator’s gleam was far more at home in both sets of eyes.

“Check the definitional terms concerning what counts as a living person for matters of seniority, office-holding, and certain bylaws. Legal code #1238, section 1a: a person is hereby identified as alive when their soul occupies a currently-living body without the use of spiritual force. As you see, Camilla Hect is quite alive. Furthermore, I am currently in a semi-stable and wholly consensual possession of her body. Quod Erat Demonstrandum: Palamedes Sextus is legally alive!” This was delivered in the tones one might use to say: Surprise, Bitch, I lived. He pounded both hands flat onto the conference table.

“Objection withdrawn, Master Warden.” Sexaginta had wilted with envy. No one here could resist a good loophole, and this one was quite airtight. Had he forcibly possessed Camilla, it would have been different — but it never would have been.

“Then let me make my intentions clear from the start: I am calling for a vote to invoke the Break Clause — to exercise our right to self-determination and secede from the Houses.”

“On what grounds?” Juno asked, her words and her pulse quickening. A grin spread across her face involuntarily as a box that had been shut for longer than she had been alive swung open.

Palamedes must have understood the intent of her question, because he answered, with something of a smile, with what only the Master Wardens had been allowed to know in full until now: “Technically, I don’t require specific grounds. The terms have always been — unconditional, save that the Warden feels it sound, and the Oversight Body approves the measure.” His face grew very grave. “The entire point was that we had a right to decide our House’s fate, one that could never be argued away.”

He'd gone very still when he’d finished dispatching the legalities of his situation — now he lifted his hand towards his face, realized what he was doing, and lowered his hand. He rapped at the table with his knuckles as his face took on an intently inward-focused knotting of the brows and compression of his mouth.

“I’ve got a lot of reasons for thinking it right. One example: I’ve heard about what happened to Dominicus a few days ago. Another large-scale disruption in that vein would do more than damage our outer shielding — it would do more than kill us. Dominicus is tied to the Emperor, and that places all the Houses as hostages wholly dependent on his safety and goodwill. Ha, goodwill.” He barked a strange little laugh at the thought. “This is a man who summoned myself and seven other House Scions so that each of us could kill our own cavaliers! For his sake, and nothing more! — and whose servant murdered six innocent people purely to satisfy her own grudges against him. One such grudge: the murder she committed to be made a lyctor.”  

Juno had heard some of that before — and the rest were obvious extrapolations of recent events. Still, the room was reeling. Someone had to venture a comment, because what else could you do, given all that to chew on? So, someone said, “This is a great deal to take in all at once. Are you arguing that the Lord our Emperor is not an adequate protector of his own people or safeguard against a second destruction for us all?”

This appeared to throw Palamedes off-script slightly, jolting him back — his gaze shifted as if to suddenly beholding a room full of people.

“Well — Yes. More detailed accounts are included in the collection of notes for your later review: mine, Camilla’s, and additional sources. They contain much more than simply what occurred while I was away.” He pushed nothing up the bridge of his nose without seeming to realize it — he only shook his head a little after. His hand swept over the landscape of papers. “I understand you require cold hard evidence, and I intend to provide it.”

“We’ve courted the danger of Dominicus for a long time. Why is it only now worth action?” Hexadecimal asked, more thoughtful than critical of it.

“Because it must be now! He’s asked too much, and I can’t look back on that with complacency,” Palamedes snapped. “Consider the costs this myriad of warfare has had — not just to our house, but to the universe; to the planets destroyed, to the people resettled, to the civilizations broken. We’ve been satisfied with it because it was far away, and there was work here to be done.”  He gestured to the cool gray walls, lit by fluorescent lights — at the library that bustled all around them. There would never not be science to be done. He built his speech like a fire, and now he sparked with a sarcastic little smile. “If you’re after a specific prompt, it’s because we finally received the message Cassiopeia the First left for us half a myriad ago. These wars, this expansion? They’ll never end. It’d be worse for all of us if they did! Because then, the Emperor could just wipe the slate clean. Just as he did before. That is the heart of the resurrection: he killed the First House to begin with. He’s never dealt truthfully with any of us! Not his lyctors, not his Houses. Not his people. He’s lied to us all, and he will continue for the rest of time.” He placed his hands flat on the table, and looked down across its length. Some of the Oversight Body was looking over the papers he’d given them; some were unable to look anyone in the eye. Juno Zeta was in the handful of people who could not look away. She’d have liked to think she was the only person who saw the show in it — the performance — but that might have just been the wounded pride. They all liked to think themselves the only smart person in the universe, after all.

“How much longer will we be a passive party to that?” he asked them, chasing the gazes of those who couldn’t bear it. “If it’s not forever, then it can’t be now . If we refuse this chance… Then we might never have the truth.” The Master Warden of the Sixth clutched nothing in his hands — but might have grasped the whole Library, right by the short hairs.

Juno Zeta folded her arms and leant back comfortably in her chair. She hadn’t even noticed leaning forward as much as she had.

“I see you’ve come prepared to make this case, Master Warden,” she said, quite casually. This would turn into a pure runaway balloon of romanticism if someone didn’t find a string. “And I admit, it’s compelling. But even if we did vote that, yes, we were done with the Empire — what then? You’ve already laid out quite nicely that we’re at God’s mercy and goodwill here, and risking that without an exit plan would just be slitting our throats to spite our necks.”

This broke the spell a little bit — someone had to whisper that that was not how that saying went. And Palamedes, breathing like he’d just run a race for the first time in his existence, sank down into his chair like a puppet with the strings cut. Juno almost worried he’d switched off with Camilla again, but he caught his breath all at once, in an incredible relief.

“Oh, that. As if our founder would have included this option without a plan to back it up.” He waved a hand with an exasperated sigh. This would normally have been the part where Camilla said something devastating — and maybe he paused a second longer, waiting for it. Poor kid. “No, there are mechanisms in place for our escape, ones that have been hidden in the structures of the House for the whole of its existence.” He gave a nod to the head of Facility Engineering Leokate Sestina, three seats down: a rather ordinary face, deeply-lined from the frazzle of upkeeping the installation, perpetually messy-haired and with a minimum of two pencils behind the ears at any time. But now her deep brown eyes were lighting up like a planetarium. “I imagine Master Scholar Sestina has an idea about what I mean.”

“This is about the Lock Mechanisms,” she said eagerly. She was vibrating so her pencil collection shook. “This is about the thrusters.”

“Yes, precisely.”

“They were designed to enable spaceflight. They were designed to clear orbit.” Sestina cried. Across the table, Nestor — who’d come up in the same year as her — sank down and clutched his head miserably.

“Yes, that’s more or less the summa-“ Palamedes was cut off as Sestina jumped to her feet, jabbing her finger at Nestor and the entire room.

“ You said I was crazy! You said they were for avoiding the volcano, or as heat pumps, and I was overthinking! But I was right all along! You laughed! Laughed! Well, who’s laughing now?!” She was, quite maniacally.  Juno was slapping the table to not burst out with her. This was the best meeting they’d had in years.

“ The point is,” Palamedes continued — trying very hard to keep Camilla’s mouth level and not snickering, “That the installation is quite prepared for space flight if we choose to. It would require a lot of obelisks to move as fast as we’d need to, but we can work out those numbers.”

“It’d be unprecedented,” murmured Sexaginta — who sounded quite intrigued by that.

“I believe we can negotiate with Blood of Eden for assistance with a long-term settlement. If this vote passes, I will appoint a committee to manage those negotiations. These are the basic facts, and the basic case. The materials I’ve provided will present the evidence.” He looked down at the clockwork Camilla had with her, and then back at the assembled Oversight Body. The lightness of the moments before fragmented and shed from his shoulders like old skin.

“I cannot make this decision for you — nor would I demand you make it blindly. But I know we’d be unsound and immoral if we remained with the status quo. We have wisdom, we have reason — but now, we must have courage, to do right by ourselves and the universe. I trust my own judgment, and I trust Casseiopeia the First’s millenia of planning. Now I must ask you to trust us — and yourselves.” He leaned forward over the table, and he looked at them all. His gaze met and held each pair of eyes in the room as if he were plucking them out of the conference room and into his own private universe, a cosmos of winter soil and cool stone, under which a thousand seeds were sleeping. Juno felt like he was pressing it all into her hands when he turned that stare onto her. His own were balled up into fists, white at the knuckle.

A timer beeped. He sighed ruefully and said, “That’s my timer. Take the notes and documents we’ve provided — and we’ll reconvene tomorrow. Think carefully tonight.”

The eyes clouded briefly over — and cleared into crystal. Camilla Hect looked down at her hands. They very slowly unclenched.

“Did he get through everything?” she asked.

“I believe so. Certainly, we’ve got a lot to think about,” Juno answered.

“Good. This meeting is adjourned.” Camilla Hect rose from the Master Warden’s chair and hurried from the room as if she were going to be chased. Juno walked out past the head of Incunabula, who was trying to flag her down to make flimsy copies and preserve the paper ones, only telling him, “Later.”

Juno found Camilla two corners away. Her face was pressed against the gray plex sheeting of the corridor wall, breathing hard.

“I’m fine,” Camilla the Sixth said. Her voice was only a little ragged. “I just need a minute.”

“I didn’t say anything, though I probably should.” She came to stand beside the cavalier, who didn’t completely straighten at the approach. Juno considered patting her shoulder — but even tired, she wasn’t sure Camilla would take that at all well. Not right now. Her shoulders screamed to not be touched or spoken to. “I’ll walk you back to your quarters, though. No refusals allowed.”

Eventually, when she straightened up, Camilla nodded.

“I just need to sleep it off,” she said — and then nothing more as they walked up to the Master Warden’s quarters. Camilla stared ahead the whole way. She unlocked the door, and as it swung open — as she faced the darkened rooms she and Palamedes had lived in since they were 13 — stopped in her tracks. The shadows of furniture shrouded in dust covers lurked somewhere in the blackness. “It’ll be so quiet tonight.”

She stepped over the threshold and the door slid shut behind her.

Chapter Text

It was a chaotic night. There were preservation efforts to be made regarding the documents Palamedes and Camilla had presented, and furthermore, they needed to be read. They were revelational enough to offset the horror that some of them had been held by outsiders for millenia.  

There were the others who had come in the shuttle with Camilla Hect — only three, and only one of whom was happy to be there. Lieutenant Crown, as she was called, was as radiantly happy to be there as the other two were miserable — “I wish I could spend more time looking around Millie’s home, but someone really has to stop Judith before she does something to get herself martyred,” she admitted. Judith was evidently the one trying to get herself martyred — Captain Deuteros, a cohort necromancer, would try and convince anyone who came close enough to warn the Emperor, or to stop Hect, or to call the Cohort, until Crown or their third companion, someone who Crown identified as Brave, shut the shuttle’s hatch to cut her off. Brave didn’t want to leave the shuttle or talk to anyone, just watch the other two with a barely-restrained paranoia.

The vote was probably already decided by then — decided and, in its way, ratified by the whole House: no one considered calling anyone on Captain Deuteros’ behalf. But it would have been handier to have Camilla the Sixth available to help Security with the shuttle and its occupants.

Before the vote itself, the following day, Camilla took them down to see what Sestina had called “the lock mechanisms.” They were quite close to the Library’s base, where it was quite warm and cramped. There was rumbling that could have been machinery and could have been seismic activity underfoot. The mechanisms rather resembled the latches on a box, built on a grand scale, and ringed the Library along the bottom of its outer hull and inside, along an inner ring. When unlocked, Camilla explained, most of the Library — very close to the entire Library would be disconnected from the foundational layer, the one that anchored it in the surface of the planet and supplied the Library with its geothermal-based back-up power. Inside the inner ring were the thrusters. If that separation happened, those would be on the new outside.

It really was capable of autonomous flight. It really was capable of leaving.

In the end, they chose to. The logistical questions were innumerable: how to get this through a stele, how many obelisks would be needed, where would they go, how long could their own internal supplies last before they would need a more permanent arrangement — but there was something wonderful in that. A real challenge! A buzz of excitement that was always close to tipping into anxiety filled the whole House once the announcement was made. And it was the whole house — the timing of exam season had been perfect. No one would be left behind.

At some point in this bustle, a thought had made Juno Zeta look up from assisting with some of the mathematics for the River displacement required to get them all through a stele — it would take them out of the system. She stared for a long time at a nearby skeleton servitor, going about its programmed business of sweeping, wholly unaware that it couldn’t continue. Outside of Dominicus’ halo, there would be no more necromancers born into the Sixth. Her pen jittered in her hands, erratically timing itself to the leaps and flutters shaking her chest.

“We won’t be the Sixth House anymore.” The scholars working beside her would have been forgiven for thinking her voice was shaking, for thinking that the tremulous needle had gone from excitement to panic.  Her fingers and her vocal chords and her body looked at the choice she’d made and saw her own death in it — the death of everything she’d built and worked for, the death of The Emperor’s Reason.

“Well,” she said, lifting her head until all she saw was the unadorned ceiling with its lemony-pale Vit-D lights, “I guess we’ll have to come up with something new to become!” She laughed from somewhere beyond her body. Her fists raised to the ceiling — the exaltation of a creation staggering to wild, unpredictable life — and they shook; she did not. “There’s so much work to be done!”

When the time came a week later — the busiest week of Juno Zeta’s life, and not even her thesis could compare — to unlock the installation from its base, it felt as if the whole Library were holding its breath. They’d secured everything into full lock-down. They crowded around every viewscreen that they could to see — from any angle — the old mechanisms come to life.

 “The die’s not cast yet. If everything fails here, then it just doesn’t go any further. No loss,” Metabus pointed out. As if he were not white-knuckling his coffee mug.

“You know that’s not it; what we’re really worried about is getting a good grade in secession, a thing it’s normal to want and possible to achieve.” With a fond shake of the head, she watched the mechanisms unlock through the view-screen.  

There was a jolt as the thrusters revved to life beneath their feet. They were off — and the Sixth House left nothing but a burnt spot on its old foundation. They made the transfer, with a nearly comical number of obelisks, and landed on an exoplanet just outside of Dominicus’ halo. It wasn’t a very sustainable place to live, but it would do while they worked out plans for the next move — they could last on stored power and provisions, as well as the Agricultural Biology department’s labors, for a few years if need be. Palamedes appointed an assembly of 16 to go to the negotiations — he and Camilla had to go back with their shuttle to a separate location on the same planet as their destination — with Juno Zeta as their head in the absence of the Master Warden. This diplomatic corp took one of their own shuttles to a distant planet with a hot yellow sky.

The initial accommodations Blood of Eden could provide were rather scroungy — the whole planet was on the thin and bedraggled side. There were a lot of mattresses on floors of a dingy rooms with damp patches on the ceiling; which seemed about the way of Blood of Eden, making do with what spaces they could commandeer in the city — which by itself had nine million people in it, from a variety of planets! Juno kept a running tally of languages she heard along the way and any juicy vocabulary she could get a definition of from someone who spoke House. The Cohort had a presence, but it was comparatively small; the Houses weren’t paying much attention here.

The negotiations were politely awkward, with what seemed almost like a revolving door of Blood of Eden commanders and bureaucrats; they struck the Master Archivist as almost as fractious and quarrelsome as the Sixth. The politeness failed to hide the tension in the other party — none of them were fond of necromancers, even the ones that held it to the level of unspoken unease. This was the foundation of one of the big dilemmas: they had a great deal of reservations about assistance with genetic diversity, or as one of the commanders put it, “We’re not fucking any zombies!” Which seemed to be their vulgar (in both senses) term for people born within the Nine Houses. They were not terribly assuaged by the information that no actual intercourse would be required, only genetic samples.

Still, there was a sort of cautious optimism, and some contact with Camilla through intermediaries or shortwave messaging systems. At least, there was until the day Juno Zeta could afterwards never fully recall.

It began with a feeling — someone, or perhaps more likely something, was watching her. There had to be a camera hidden in their rooms, or a bug, or a person hiding under the furniture. It was watching her and stripping her down to the very marrow of her soul. Then, it was an itching dread, a terrible feeling of death looming. She considered the possibility of a heart attack — and perhaps she was lucky she did not try and find out too hard, given all that came after (she was not sure she would have kept a grip on her aptitude).

The light took on a bluish tinge — and that was when it all collapsed into incoherence. Into the frantic peeling of skin under her fingernails, scratching for the collection of pill bugs curled up in her skin. Into shouts — things no one else seemed to understand, things she didn’t understand shouted back at her. Into the flinching and vomiting of any water brought to her lips like a rabid animal. There were moments she was aware of being pushed, of the smell of sulfur and saltpeter, of bright, peppery gunshots — those probably happened. Something tearing her apart from the inside, like the eyes on her had gone looking for something tucked inside her — those probably did not. The metal tang of blood in her mouth and in the air that made her think she was drowning. Rooms flashed in and out of her awareness — people — panicking — she took them in like breaths of air as the sea tossed her. Her thoughts whirred like fan blades — like they’d become sharp and invisible, moving so fast that they’d become flickers she felt more than thought. She needed to tell someone something — she was shouting and shouting.   

At one moment, she thought she understood what she wanted to tell someone. She and the watching thing had switched places; it had pushed aside her soul and torn her open. She had climbed into the sky and seen: The small and dusty planet with its goldenrod yellow sky sprawled out before her eyes with its cities like scars cut through deserts and its crawling life like the bugs; somewhere on that planet was the same blood as her blood — the flesh of her flesh, stolen — murdered and caught in the agony of alien shapes –

At one point, she screamed for the Warden. Or she thought she did, anyway.

In there, someone’s voice whispered hoarsely to stop, it’s ok , please, you need to be quiet. At some point, someone must have sedated her — though she didn’t know it at the time. Her thoughts and feelings slowed down, became thick and liquid. She was aware at that point of being tied down — she thought she saw perhaps Kester Cinque from Political Science leaning over her, watching very carefully. The hand she raised to try and reach for something, any relief — had blood under the fingernails. One had been pulled half-off and was bleeding. Then she slept, and knew nothing more. 

She was lucid the next day, for a while. It took her a few minutes to get reoriented — a new, worse room, lightless and crammed. Most of them were sprawled on the ground, a few were tied to gurneys. No one knew what had happened — save that something had appeared in the sky outside, some blue and looming shape. And every single necromancer had absolutely lost their shit. Juno was mostly very tired and very thirsty. There had been fighting and arguing; every necromancer they brought had been sedated, and everyone was locked in this room.

When it came back, it was much the same — save that they were better prepared for it. They kept changing locations when Juno was out — hustled to bigger or smaller rooms, or cells, or sometimes getting tied to whatever was convenient. No one seemed to know what to do about them. “We are being brought food — but the negotiations are out,” Kiana reported. There were only a handful of non-adepts present, and they experienced nothing. “It’s enough to stop you from getting shot or separated.”

But they were the House Formerly Identified as Sixth, so they began to consider their options. The pattern of the attacks was based on the orbit of the thing in the sky — the closer and more visible (according to Kiana, Kester, and the other non-adepts, who were not sedated when they were moved), the worse it was. Sometimes they were lucky, and the effect was a sort of stupor, rather than a violent attack like the first had been. In moments of near-lucidity, they tried to ground themselves as best they could on things they could touch, see, smell, hear. Many of them reported seeing the blue light with their eyes closed. They developed theories. They all saved up metal wrappers of their rations to attempt some sort of head-sized Faraday cage, in case it was electromagnetic. It was not, though they weren’t at all confident it would have worked anyway.

They concluded the most likely cause was some sort of radiation being carried by the visible light, through the eyes, and the best solution they could think of emerged: remove its accessways. They weren’t sure where the absorption became harmful, so their blinding needed to be very thorough. In the hours of calm, they made their procedure. There was no testing except to do it — Juno volunteered as an early subject. She wanted her mind back to herself. She wanted to know what was going on. And she wanted to do it, and do it thoroughly, herself.

This made her think back of all the times she had cautioned Palamedes Sextus against using himself as a test subject; against trusting that he knew everything and therefore could handle everything.

“Well, a little hypocrisy is the spice of life,” she said. It made her smile — and because she could smile, she was calm and steady when she severed her optic nerve. She did everything she could to prevent her eyes from picking up anything, with layers of redundancy. But it was hard going — she could feel herself slipping even as she worked, back into what their captors appeared to be calling blue madness. She prayed she wasn’t. But the strain of performing necromancy there hit her like a bookshelf collapsing onto her — she lost just under a liter of blood from blood sweat and nosebleeds, and felt weak and exhausted and lightheaded for well over a week, in and out of consciousness. Their captors didn’t seem to notice the difference — but the rest of them did.

She was not screaming, and she did not fight. She was tired and out of it, but the lining of her throat healed. When she’d recovered, she was wholly lucid and awake — in a world of utter darkness. The rest could only follow those results.

Now that none of them were writhing around and screaming, it was clear that it wasn’t just chaos, confusion, and fear driving Blood of Eden. No, they’d had a factional dispute — and the faction now in control of their persons, presented with a calm populace, were resolved on playing keep-away. They were shepherded — at first as a whole group, and later in smaller sub-groups — into the backs of enormous vehicles, ones nearly the size of shuttles, under threat of gunfire. The beast around them roared and hummed around them like they’d stepped into its belly. And there they mostly stayed — switching vehicles sometimes, or stopping to toss them food and water.

And, about a week into this, they had to reveal another layer of their situation. The truck stopped and a soldier entered, flanked by two others.

“Proof of life has been requested,” said the front and center one, through a voice changing mask that flattened their tone and had an unpleasant low-grade electric hum, besides. “Please state into the recorder your name, the status of your organization, and the answer to the following question: What is Juno Zeta’s trick with dice?”

All heads swung towards her. She rose to her feet so fast she nearly tripped over them — and smiled so hard the cracks in her lips split.

That question was part of a sequence, and it was a little more than that.  They had all weathered — and they would endure. Now it was just a matter of patience. Which Blood of Eden made a tinier bit difficult: The soldiers did not answer back when Juno tried to speak to them, so she had to entertain herself.

She was fairly good at that. They practiced things — quadratic equations out loud until that had to be stopped or else the Chair of Mathematics would have caused an Incident — poetry and mnemonics, and most of them could give lectures until they were blue in the face. There was rarely enough food or water, but there was enough to survive, and the questions kept coming, each one saying in its private way we’re still alive, we’re still looking for you, we’re relieved to hear you’re well. And they mostly were. It was kind of fun, like being back in the dorms, except everyone was better read and smellier.

That period came to an end almost as abruptly as it had begun. That day, the air outside was wild with thunder and gunshot, and the air was hotter and hotter in the truck. The truck began to make some absolutely wild swerves, which sent them knocking into each other in piles. They barely had a chance to right themselves before the whole thing came to an abrupt halt full of screeching metal. She’d managed to pick herself up and steady herself against the sides of their enclosure before there were voices outside the truck.

“I am asking you to stand back,” came a voice in lightly accented House, feminine but not very high, instead sort of ruffled and stressed. “Until your people can be verified.”

“Your request will be reviewed by the committee when I have a committee,” came the answering voice — probably a man’s, and one speaking absolutely perfect House in an accent so familiar as to register to Juno Zeta only as an accent in theory.

“What, have we been traded to the cohort for clemency, now?” muttered the Chair of Mathematics.

“Oh, I doubt it,” she answered. She was shaking — from anticipation that was almost more than she could bear. There was a quieter argument from the outside, and then a sudden rush of hot air, billowing into the truck’s cargo hold. It smelled like concrete and sweat and motor oil. And, inexplicably, it brought her a whiff of pomade.

“Is everyone alright, within expected parameters?” The second voice then let out a sigh that sounded as though it’d been held in for months.

“No acute damage,” she answered back. If she did what she really wanted and elbowed someone aside, there was a good chance they’d all go tumbling to the metal flooring. Instead, she detached from the side of the truck and straightened. “May I ask who’s taken control of this situation?”

“This is the Master Warden speaking,” he responded earnestly. Juno fell to picking over that not-quite-an-answer for evidence, which meant it was someone else who asked, “Can we get some confirmation of this?”

“It really is,” came a very faint voice from beyond the open doors — very nearly flat, save a hint of something that was like clasping your hands around a warm drink on a cool day. It was Camilla Hect’s voice, which set everyone to talking at once. Conjectures, ideas, the undeniable hope that this was actual liberty and not some bizarre new phase in this ongoing situation — and speculation about who exactly the Master Warden was wearing, in the literal sense.

“And why does his hair look like it’s made of plex?”

“Questions which can all be answered once everyone’s had a chance to get out of here and be seen by a medic. We’re not out of danger yet.” Which was the best thing everyone had heard in months, honestly, and that shut them up, even as he added, “Except that last one, I have no idea how much product goes into this hair.”

People were being herded off in triage order, or very nearly; Juno herself was a surprisingly early departure, for all that she was mostly able to keep herself upright. She was led out by a young officer from a different Blood of Eden faction — which complicated the relief somewhat — who she learned through interrogation had the absolutely splendid name of How Far The Little Candle Throws His Beams Were Still Gallantly Streaming When My Heart Is Breaking I Can Close My Eyes And It’s Already Here, which she had acquired upon joining, having taken the first part from another soldier who had been something of a mentor, but selected the other parts from previous member rolls because they sounded good. Juno quite liked that reason, or at least the first part.  Candle was a relatively young officer.

They stepped down an unrolled ramp, very carefully, out into a cavernous space. The sense of it — of trucks roaring in the distance, of people going to and fro, cots being wheeled out and unfolded, all echoing on concrete and rebar — very nearly made her dizzy. She could feel the light of the high-beams on her, even if they didn’t illuminate anything in her world. In that, she and the figure beside her were just sensations in the darkness — in the tunnel, they’d have been casting immense shadows under the hot beams.

“Steady, ma’am,” Candle said when Juno stumbled, with a bit of the harshness coming out of her voice. They’d arrived at wherever they intended to arrive. “I’m setting you down now, and someone’ll look at you.”

“That will be me, if you don’t mind.” The sound of something wheeled had stopped, pushed by — judging from the voice — the stranger’s body that was apparently possessed by the Master Warden. This got the officer to flee very quickly, muttering something about the zombiest fucking zombie.

“Master Archivist,” said the zombiest fucking zombie, Palamedes Sextus, leaning in close. “It’s Palamedes. May I take your pulse? I’ve got a lot of things to ask, and a lot of things I know I ought to say, but we don’t have much time for — reunions. And I’d like to know you’re alright.”

 “Go right ahead with the exam, Master Warden. I’m right as can be, under the circumstances –” And she could hear the intake of breath — a little rusty — that was probably about to be something. An apology, maybe, for the way things had played out. The hand on her wrist was cold and dead, without an ounce of decay shriveling the fingers. The nails were very even and well-tended. She hurried on, very pointedly, “For which, Master Warden, I’m not blaming any of ours. We all bore things the best we could with the information we had.”

 “You’ve done brilliantly, all of you.” He held the contact for a long moment, his voice deliberate and sincere. “I can only thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for holding out this long.” He sighed and waited out the moment, and for tender reunions, this had to be all there could be. He gave Camilla — who was sitting somewhere not far from the cot on which Juno sat — the reading to note down, before he resumed with a blood pressure cuff. “And you figured out the best solution anyone has to the issue of the resurrection beast’s aura; fantastic work. I’ve seen how much worse it can get.”

 “I can imagine it has gotten…much worse. At first, blinding ourselves was enough to ward it all off, but lately, I still feel worms under my skin at what I’m guessing is midday or so, as regular as clockwork!” She shuddered even now at the thought.

“I’m aware this is a lot to ask, but how up are you — any of you — to necromantic work? It’s really very important. My own options are extremely limited while I’m wearing this particular meat suit.”

“Which meat suit is that, out of curiosity?” She reached over with her free arm and patted the cool cheek of the face before her. She wasn’t much of a judge of faces at the best of times, so she didn’t know what she’d say it was — young. Handsome, maybe. 

“An ass,” supplied Camilla, whose voice was very thin and quiet — and weirdly relaxed despite it all.

“A good summary,” Palamedes agreed before adding briskly, “He was the dead cavalier of a lyctor, who I’m holding in a sort of — spiritual cage inside the brain. She arrived using it as a convenient proxy-body, and she will manage to take it back from me in not too long.”

“There’s a lot that’s been happening, I take it — you’ve been having a great deal of fun without me.”

“Not without you.” This was perhaps more honest than it merited. “But there has been a lot. I don’t even know how to begin to explain the heralds — except that they are nightmarish, the result of a planetary revenant, and they also induce madness to fully-intact necromancers — and they are starting to get into the tunnels.”

“The line’s holding right now,” Camilla murmured.

“‘Right Now’ is the key phrase for every single aspect of this situation. As a result, we need to get off-planet Right Now, which means we need to be able to unpick some fiendishly good wards on a shuttle’s fuel Right Now, get Camilla stabilized Right Now — Hell, get Nona stabilized Right Now, and then we’ll have the space for our next steps.” He enumerated this staggering array of situations with only a hint of strain in his voice; he sounded almost more annoyed than panicked. He read out her blood pressure in the same tone of voice for Camilla to write down. And: “And Nona’s another in the category of ‘there’s a lot that’s been happening.’ ”

“Oh? And who would she be, and is she causing things, or are things happening to her? Those are pretty different.” Juno asked.

“Nona’s …a girl we’ve been looking after for a while. I think she wanted to meet you, but right now, she’s out like a light. As for your other question…Both. Mostly, she’s been happening, but I’m very worried she’s going to stop happening very soon. We’re trying a basic spirit ward to keep her soul taped to the body she’s using, but it’s not going to hold.” This was said almost more to himself than Juno. And: “She’s been…a great deal of help. And of comfort. So help me, I’m not intending to let her die. I’m not intending to let anyone die.” This had a great deal of finality — a ball, rolling down to rest at the base of a hill. Or maybe: the ball, tipping over the top of the hill, after hours and hours of pushing it up.

“I’d love to meet her — and to assist, but Master Warden, that’s…” She was more disappointed than she was afraid of the probable death sentence she was handing down. Master Archivist Juno Zeta lifted her head up to the darkness and gave any hope of an alternate answer emerging from the background one last shot. The noise of the tunnel and its slow leakage of very weary people to the spaces around her filled the gaps. “It’s just not an option. It nearly killed us when we blinded ourselves, and I’m not sure we’ve got the reserves to take that sort of shock again.”

“ Fuck,” Palamedes said emphatically. He withdrew a little ways, the voice a tiny bit more distant. “Alright, that’s those plans absolutely demolished.”

His footsteps, which were slower than Juno would have thought, dragging in one leg — a side-effect, perhaps, of the body he was in being dead — echoed in a tight back-and-forth line in front of her for a few passes.

“What do you suppose the legal ramifications of this body are?” She mused — a bit of a bait, really. Palamedes clicked his tongue and let out an aggrieved sigh.

“Really? I’ll find something to justify it, just you wait,” he answered. The pacing stopped. There was a sound of rummaging in a bag — of ripping flimsy — the liquid sloshing of water being mixed. And the calloused, manicured hands of the dead body put a bottle of water between her own. Palamedes huffed once — not quite a laugh, but like he set down an enormous weight. “Drink that. It’s got some electrolyte powder mixed in.”

Ah, life-bringing water, nectar of the gods! A sentence she had never thought before and would probably never think again, but taking a long pull of it and feeling it fall down her throat with coolness following after, spreading out like a wake behind a ship, was perfection. A smile chased after that coolness, expanding until it was inescapable. The world took a breath with her.

“Mum.” Palamedes’ tone had quickened and relaxed — stretched itself out like a big cat waking up. “Do you think you’d be up to calculate a few things for me, while I see to the –” here, he did something inaudible with his hands, “Everything else, really, and to my preparations?”

“Oh, yes. Once I’ve finished this, I think I’ll be even interested in having a poke around.”

“Please don’t,” murmured Camilla.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get it done. What do you need?”

And he told her — calculations of distance and dilation, of moving a large mass spiritually — not by a stele, but he didn’t explain what it was he intended. Mass and spiritual warding, thanergy reactions both ornate and enormous. Even with most of the raw data, she couldn’t understand its entire shape. Except: It would take a lot more power; it would take more than the Sixth House had in its entirety, under its ideal conditions.

“Thank you.” Palamedes' voice came from very close by now. He had crouched next to her, for just a moment — though he didn’t exactly need to, just to hand her some flimsy and a pen. He held her hand around the pen — squeezed it with those cold dead fingers like another reunion — or maybe, a goodbye. And then, in a flutter, was apart. He rose in one great rush.  “I think we can do this,” he said, in a voice that pierced stormclouds — it showered the air with light around him. He laughed, low and quick. ”I think that it’ll happen. We’ll make it happen. I swear it: Archivist, this time, everybody lives!”

Unlike before, his footsteps sounded very light. She kept her head trained on him for a moment longer, as he wheeled Camilla away. She felt like — not that she could see him, but that there had been something in that decision. There had been a lot in that warcry, which might have been his whole life. And he knew it was, too.

Alright. I look forward to seeing what you’ll do with this, Master Warden Palamedes Sextus. She took another long drink, and she began to do those calculations. And have that poke around. If he was going to have fun, she might as well.

When she saw them again and met their new friends, it was all almost ready. It was all nearly done — and she rather thought she understood it, as she leaned on Commander We Suffer’s arm (A charming woman, the commander), leading into that cluster of people around Palamedes and Camilla.

She recognized it — something in the tone, something in that vigil. In the moment — at once so private and so incredibly naked and exposed. She chuckled in her throat, because she didn’t know what was coming — but also, she thought she knew something.

She’d made a promise long ago to play her part in this moment in the tunnel.

It unfolded with the smell of burnt flesh; thanergy and thalergy cascaded from that spot, from which emerged the sound of crackling fire and a wordless ah ah ah. It was a blossom of energy, it was a sun: the same star-stuff all burning and merging, nuclear fusion in its dance.  It would go on and on; it would stretch out into the infinite.

She was blown away.

The person who emerged from that conflagration, borrowing Kiana and We Suffer’s clothing, took up a strange amount of space — a magnetic space, a radiating heat; it was easy to follow their movements, which were otherwise quiet and sharp. It wasn’t exactly the way Palamedes or Camilla felt or moved, which was informative. It gave Juno a much better sense of the space they’d created inside the tunnels, like she imagined echolocation must feel like.

The Love That Is Perfected By Death (identity assumed) came to her midway through their quick check-ups and herding people. She had spent much of the time awaiting that on working out what questions to ask — there were so many it made her feel crowded out and small. And for the second as that gravitational well drew closer and closer, and she opened her mouth — she did not know what was going to come out. She didn’t know what to say.

“I think my physical conditioning might not appreciate all the excitement,” she said, wedging the words in. “Shame on it. Just because I’ve been in a box for a few months doesn’t mean my body can wuss out on me.”

 “It’s been a busy day,” the person excused. They took one of her hands for just a second and gave it a brusque little squeeze that sent a sigh of relief through her body.  Then, they let go without any further fanfare than, “That should help.”

It did help, which — she didn’t know if this was what she wanted or not. But she asked them,“‘Everybody Lives’ is distinct from ‘nobody dies,’ isn’t it?” 

The new person paused for a moment, a curious and waiting silence. 

“A little,” they said, gravely and gently.

 “Of course it is.” She sighed, and tried another stab. “Well, even so. It was beautiful work, Master Warden-and-Hand.” She didn’t know what else to call them and waved a hand in a restless irritation about it. “Honestly, the legalities of that situation feel like they’ll be quite thorny. There’s going to be a committee, you know.”

“Thank you. The legalities can hang,” said the Warden-and-Hand crisply, “We’re well beyond them now.” They strode quickly off to the next person, like a whirlwind given form.

“Oh, is that what being on the receiving end is like?” She asked no one, who probably would have told her that she was much noisier when she disrupted everything and went sailing along to the next thing. She could tell that much. “Beautiful and terrible, and my honor to behold,” she murmured after that receding wave.

They arrived at the Ninth — which gave rise to a gentle sigh as the ambient thanergy filled the air. The pressing, full feeling of it was heavy as humidity, but somehow still so relieving. They waited there for some time, discussing the journey — Juno recounted some of the sums she’d done to get them there — the people with vision gave more thorough reports of what a bizarre journey it had been — and the little dog barked at the environment around the truck: the rocks and gravel of the landing field, mostly. He settled when some of the more fearless and less allergic Masters decided to pet the dog, remarking on the breeding on display in the six legs. The situation seemed stable enough.

“I’m going to find out what’s taking so long,” Juno decided. “And see if we can’t borrow supplies, even if this is just a temporary layover.”

“They’re opening the Locked Tomb, not taking a field trip,” someone dissented, because there was always one. They ended up taking a small handful of people as an expedition to meet the Ninth, who were alarmed and suspicious. And armed for siege, which brought them all into a huddle about the situation. They didn’t have any supplies, or barely any aid, to lend. They had a handful of tired, dirty necromancers, a princess, a schoolteacher, and an angry bodyguard who hated all of them with a pair of machetes. And the dog, of course, who was very sweet. Most of the Ninth had never seen an animal. Well, aside from the local species of bioluminescent beetle they called a worm.

It was deep into making plans for some sort of trap, and from there more rigorous diagnostic tests on these ‘devils,’ that the Master-Warden-and-Hand returned from the Tomb, with Pyrrha Dve, a depressed Ninth corpse, and a twitching Lyctor. This involved more fuss, but it was decided that they had to take a spell to regroup and plan their next steps. Which was mostly more arguing, but some very careful shepherding of the little party of refugees down to the monument.

The Warden-and-Hand was going by Paul, a fact related among the high-speed bustle; they strode about everywhere, requisitioning pants so Kiana had something to wear in the cold of the Ninth, checking the Ninth over for uninfected injuries, mending those injuries, observing. It was a little while before they had time to find her.

The big lift that had carried them down to the monument stood before her; from the texture, the box of rattling metal was more than a bit rusted, the surface of the iron flaking under her fingertips. She’d opened up one of the shrouded mechanisms to get a sense of the controls, but working blind, she wasn’t making a great deal of progress. But apparently, no one on the Ninth knew how it held up to time, nor about any of the generators or other technical devices hidden beneath tattered old banners, so what else was she going to do? Scour the Ninth’s library, maybe, but that would have to wait. 

“I’m in awe of the craftsmanship, though. This was built to last on a dramatic scale, don’t you think?” She asked the footsteps echoing on the stone before the lift. Long in the stride, quick in the step — efficient, nearly silent. Boots that didn’t perfectly fit.

“Please stop trying to do electrical work when you can’t see,” Paul told her, matter-of-factly.

“No one can tell me how it’s still running,” she protested without bothering to look up from her lean against the wall, hovering over the control panel. She brushed over an insulated wire with the heavy-oil insulation crumbing off under her fingers. These, she could trace from their source. These, she could hold onto and follow — beginning to end, cause to effect. Electricity followed clear paths, with measurable resistances.

It wasn’t as if she couldn’t see the smallness of the endeavor. Her hands just itched for something to do. Paul sighed in a way which suggested that they were not unfamiliar with the instinct. Their hand — which was just Camilla’s hand, steady and calloused at the grips — steered her away from the elevator with a quick and gentle push, like steered by a feather.

“We’re out of the beast’s halo now. I’d like to heal your vision.”

“If you think you can; we were quite thorough, since we weren’t willing to risk that we could let anything through and survive — slipshod work would be letting the side down, in any case.” Her hands found the edge of a large rock — less a seat than a cut-in alcove of the wall, complete with a skeleton standing tucked inside it. She ran a hand over its feet — they were pinned to keep the bones together and upright — bone pins, rather than metal. Impressive, if impractical. She perched on the edge of the alcove, tucking her braid away from the skeleton, settling her robe around her like a bird adjusting its feathers on a line.

“I noticed. You’ve wrecked the corneas, the retinas, and the optic nerve.” Paul had leant over her appraisingly. The sound of scribbling followed, the scratch of a pen on a piece of flimsy. And there was a tone of certainty in Paul’s voice, almost a hum of contentment. It was absolutely tinged with smugness as they added, “I can work with that.”

She squirmed as Paul touched a finger to the bags beneath her eyelids. None of them had slept well, of course, and she knew she must be a sight, and — how much had the events of the last months, or even the pyre of their birth, touched the face that was no doubt peering at her? Had it all been wiped away?

“Then let me change the subject, if you don’t mind me chattering while you proceed.” This got a hm of assent. “I was wondering, what are your thoughts about continuity of self, as applied to your specifically novel situation?”

“Of course you were.” If a voice could roll its eyes, Paul’s voice might have. It was perhaps the most concentrated feeling they’d expressed, like a stiletto knife. They’d taken their hand back, and the note-taking scratching intensified. “It’s a difficult one. Language barely begins to describe my existence.” They might have been smiling, then; what sort of smile it was — a slow sunrise or a shooting star’s suddenness or something entirely different — Juno couldn’t begin to guess. It probably was a different smile.

“Does that mean you don’t intend to answer?” Juno clasped one hand in the other and wrung it, feeling out the thinness of her own long bones.

“No. Just that there’s nothing as easy as a correct answer. We died, and then, we transcended.” They were quiet for a moment. The pencil went tip-tap, tip-tap.

“Nothing is what it was, and nothing is destroyed. Having everything we were in me transforms all of it — I’m not what we were. The subjective experience does not alter that. But, subjectively I didn’t come into being from nothing, three hours ago; our memories are mine, equally and separately. Which is actually somewhat problematic,” they added a little more briskly, like this was an item on an agenda: organize contents of brain. And, with a sort of wistful kindness: “I could try something like: Ei Eram, Ego Sumus. But the grammar can’t hold it all.”

Juno leaned forward on her perch and touched — the edge of the clipboard. Not even a shoulder or a knee, but the rounded plex edge. She left her hand there for a second, like through it, the question could be transmitted better than she knew how to ask. But she wasn’t giving up asking anyway.

“Do you miss them? Or miss being them, I suppose; or both, perhaps, since that ambivalence does seem to be the order of the day?” She waited, a pause in which she thought Paul might have been looking at her hand; they might have been looking at her face. This was valuable data going to waste without being seen.

“It’s been three hours.” Paul’s necromancy had a certain too-real quality to it; she’d noticed it before, and now it was all the clearer. It was a beam of light, the feeling of eyes on the lenses of her eyes and the nerves connecting them to her brain, bright and clear. The pencil’s quick scribbles slowed, until each stroke sounded very small and alone. “But I think one day, I will look for someone else’s face…And there is no one else. Call it nostalgia.”

The pencil clicked as it was set down, and all that attention was turned back onto her.

“And you will. You’ll miss your children. Your students.” These weren’t questions — they were simple facts, points on a chart. Their hands were very warm when they brushed her temples, sweeping over the corner of the socket where crows’ feet fanned outward. Paul kept going with the slow caution of someone picking each of their words out from somewhere deep inside them, and said, “We loved you, as a mother and as a guide. Palamedes and Camilla loved you. I still do — that’s not optional.   But I don’t know what...” And then did something that seemed very unusual — they hesitated. Their hands curled back, just out of reach. She could still feel the traces of warmth, the faint electric feeling of someone’s hand that you anticipated touching you, but they hadn’t yet. The voice that resumed was very fast, like they’d had to build momentum to it, like they’d said too much — in not saying what came next. “What you’d like our relationship to be considered, going forward. Maybe it’s too fresh for you to know.”

“You’re right; I will miss the way things were. It’d be hard not to.” She drummed her fingers together — a restless gesture, one that led her start to piece the words together. It was almost a puzzle. “But that’s hardly unprecedented. None of this is — except, of course, all the ways in which it is, as a project. With which I am very impressed.”

“Thank you,” Paul said politely. And maybe that could have been the end of it — but she’d barely worked at it, yet. All she had was a few jagged edges, a little bit of sky; a boy who would never come sighing into her office again. A child who’d never cause trouble, poking around to get a response, again.

“But there’s nothing new in that — in missing the ways things were before, I mean. I, frankly, did not know what I was getting into, agreeing to have a child. I think I’ve learned some of it; probably not all of it, let’s not award me a mother of the year trophy, which would be a dreadful thing to start keeping score on, anyway.” That, of all the stupid things, was the thing that brought Paul’s fingers back to her head, very gently, with a huff not quite of laughter. She felt something unfolding from that touch. “I think watching children is watching someone you love become an unrecognizable new person all the time: a whole series of them, modifying the design of themselves, testing them out, making adjustments — some of them can be quite radical — and learning, all the time, who they could be. If you spend Quarter 2 collating old Ninth house manuscripts and you don’t go poke your nose in, you never get to see the person you knew in Quarter 1 again.

“Except you do. You see those experiments in the result. And in the result, maybe you see the next experiment. It’s never over. And it all — collects.” That could have been true — or it could have just been her, never having learned to forget. Maybe she just hoped she’d see it, when she stepped back; the way it all fit together. Things were fitting together internally — a sudden sharp, tingly sensation which might have been her smile and might have been her optic nerve getting reconnected. With it came a little blossom of — light, or blurry motion — or something that made the re-awakening sensation painless as a breeze.

“This is an unusual sort of experiment; but they were always unusual kids. I chose to love being amazed by things I hadn’t even imagined. Also, a strangely large number of pyrotechnics, which were not my favorite,” she added, in something more like her normal voice.

“We wanted you all to know,” they said. But also: “I’ll do my best to minimize them in the future.” The suggestion of movement at her eye-level — might have been a shadow of a familiar tilt to the head; it could have been anything. Only that it settled, and their hands settled, light as a bird coming to land. She urged her eyes to focus as hard as they could on that. She blinked, which — was it a bad idea to blink while someone was fixing up your corneas? A good idea?

“…Does closing my eyes impair your ability to work on them, out of curiosity?”

Camilla Hect’s olive skin swam into focus, and then dark brown hair that was nearly black — but burnt short, the ends a little singed still. And this — and more than that — had reinterpreted Camilla Hect’s face into, well, Paul’s face, differently from the way Palamedes Sextus had reinterpreted the same features. As they emerged from the shadows, Paul wore their newness in the borrowed clothes and their implausibly luminous eyes — which looked as if they came from a brighter universe, so full of light in those crystalline irises that the pupil was washed gray-brown — and in the patient, cautious look they wore as she appraised them. It was fearless, but it was a shade of fearless that was chosen over fear — aware there was something to be demure about, in this first sight, and standing in it instead. They had a clip-board on one knee and were taking notes without looking down at it.

“No,” said Paul. “How’s that?”

“Vision is fine. And, anyway, out of about four potential parents — unless you count it for six, which from all descriptions would be unsettling — I’m the only mother, and thereby automatically entitled to all appropriate appellations, honors, and research grants.  The fathers will have to fight to the death — don’t worry about Nestor and Metabus, they’ll get there, eventually, they just need time to adjust to the idea — over the remainder, or something, while I get to sit back and watch. Maybe with popcorn.” She clasped her hands together and grinned devilishly, like the whole room could be lit up by the dynamo of energy. “You didn’t ask, but my money’s on Nestor. Do you think I could get popcorn here?”

“Vision is fine.” Paul rolled their two-toned eyes, but made a note on their flimsy. “…I wouldn’t discount Lykomedes so quickly; they’d have invited him to see if they could.” There was a long silence as they finished their notes. 

“And…don’t terrorize the Ninth too much, Archivist; They’ve never seen someone cheerful before,” their mouth said. But then that mouth settled into a real, easy smile that made the sharp lines of their face into something radiant, an aurora that cast itself in the brilliant gray of their outer rim and the shining slate of their pupil. 

And in that smile, Juno Zeta really did see it all — that they had been a child who was like a shadow cast by water, and a teenager of sharp, scissor-faced ambition, and a young woman of fathomless endurance sinking deep into its blackness; and they had been, too, a leader with a new world in his sights, and a young man of brilliant and foolish love, and a child whose ambitions burned the universe, and an odd and distracted toddler. They had once been — and were not, and could never be again — an infant who’d looked like a baby heron.

 Juno Zeta did not grieve herself too much about things that were over, things which could not be the same. It wasn’t her style; the past was, in a way, still a part of the present. If someone a myriad from now used psychometry on her bones, maybe, if they looked hard enough, they would see that she’d had a child. Maybe they would see a sublime and tender necromancy that had enfolded her eyes. It would all be there — in the echo of her soul would be the touch of theirs. And in their soul, or souls — would be her touch. They never would forget — the memory would just await a spark. You are Here, pointed out the Hippocampus. And she had to agree. She could be blown away all over again.