Archive of Our Own

There was much satisfaction Ratio found in an empty laboratory. Trapped between the point-precise measured furniture was a liminal silence you were loath to find anywhere else in the Universe. Beyond the hum of an exhaust fan and the rare drip of a tap was a blank slate of sense—blinding white and inert air and the lacking stench of idiocy inherent to people. It was peace. He liked to run his hands across the pale surface of the silicon dioxide counters, one at each side, and walk down the central artery of the room. Never would he find a bump or obstruction.

For a brief moment in time, humanity showed its competence, and all the prodigious inventions borne of centuries of wit and toil coalesced into this fine space. If he could spend the rest of his hours there, despite the hyperbolic nature of the ask, he would have considered saying yes.

With the wild sand-riddled wind of Sigonia-IV slashing across his face and the unpleasant thud-thud of their luggage in the rear, he considered that yes with twofold eagerness. Their driver seemed insistent on leaving his window rolled down, his arm resting upon the doorframe and unbothered by the hot air rushing in. Ratio had many choice words to say to this, but his presence was not alone in their jeep, and he schooled his tongue. The impact of the uneven dunes sent jolts up his spine. It was hard not to scowl, at the least. 

That beautiful laboratory, situated on the sixteenth floor of Veritas Prime University, the second room from the left staircase down, was seven hundred and twelve light-years away now. Upon the newly relinquished planet of Sigonia-IV, he would be fortunate to find half the comfort he knew.

He would be fortunate to find anything. If a laboratory was testament to life’s desire to learn and progress, Sigonia was a testament to life’s inevitable greed for more, and to forget the lessers before it.

In an effort to still his meandering mind, he ran his hands over the leather of his seat. It was nothing like the predictable flat of a countertop, rather grainy and organic and worn with time, but it was enough to soothe his nerves.

He sighed and gazed out the window. Order seemed lost in these lands; as far as the eye could see ran undulating waves of sand and the scrappy remains of tents torn through as if by claws and teeth. It was hard to make out much through the whirling soot and the scratched-up windows of their jeep, but even still, Ratio couldn’t spot any signs of life. The OLED display on the inner layer of the jeep window indicated outside temperatures to be upwards of 315.15 Kelvin. If there was life, he only felt sorry for it.

Their jeep trudged along the desert dunes, each slope up spewing guttural noises as it cut through the hot desert air. Several times, their journey was interrupted by pockmarked lesions where the sand was transformed into glass. Evidence of meteor strikes, several hundred thousand of them. More evidence of this planet’s misfortune, and more reason why even the IPC—for whom mass ownership at any cost was an easy reality—had given up and granted this world its sovereignty.

“Quite the mess, is it not?” The man beside him—and the reason for Ratio’s neutered speech—had the voice of an old dog. He looked like one, too, but not like any old mutt. His salt-and-pepper hair was much too coiffed, and his cuffs and collars felt measured to the millimetre. “Two decades of IPC interference weren’t enough to bring them to civility.”

Ratio swallowed around a dry throat. He’d read about what had transpired on Sigonia five years ago in his mission brief and didn’t find it productive to counter someone who’d clearly ignored the facts.

The man beside him chuckled gravely at his silence, “I know we disagree, young doctor. But the sciences are your expertise, and business is mine. No matter how the strings were pulled, Sigonia would always fail to deliver.”

Ratio could not help but click his tongue. “That is an opinion you are entitled to.”

The man chanced a look at him, dusky eyes the colour of tin, evaluating him with intrigue. Oswaldo Schneider was a dog the kind the old monarchs owned, tall and proper hounds who lay by the fireplace, existing only as living regalia until a threat was made.

When Ratio spoke no further, Oswaldo only hummed.

⟐

The moment they’d arrived in the main city of Kaeri, he and Oswaldo had parted ways. Oswaldo had made his way to a local saloon known for hosting IPC and foreign diplomats to catch a quick smoke or drink. Ratio had turned down the offer to join him and halt the patronising dismissal he knew was coming. There were no illusions as to how little Oswaldo needed him.

That left him standing alone in the city centre, amidst the sparse foot traffic of locals and the distant chime of temple bells.

The stout buildings, mud flats of decent construction, were decorated with artisanal paints, growing to four stories at most. Not tall enough to shield the sun from his eyes. No one but a stray tan alley cat, perched on the balustrades of a nearby balcony, paid Ratio any heed. Most had faces covered under heavy linen shawls to block out the wind and sand. Ratio pulled his own collar higher and grimaced.

Upset at his purposelessness, he wandered through the streets of beiges and browns to scout out the location where he and Oswaldo were to meet with their local liaison in six system hours. The faster he could finish this detour, acquire his funding, and return to his sterilised airs, the better.

It was not that Ratio disliked Sigonia or minded the poor conditions—no, such an opinion would have him disliking a third of the Universe. Sigonians had little choice of what planet they were born on, and much less a choice in what galactic superpower opted to toy with them at any given moment. What Ratio loathed, rather, was his fellow company. Even the thought alone made him grimace. Oswaldo had strung Ratio along only because the hound had proven he couldn’t be trusted alone after the tragedy of the Katican-Avgin Ethnocide on Sigonia. As Oswaldo and the local lords negotiated reparations, Ratio was to play the part of the neutral peacemaker—an unbiased man of science and logic who was nevertheless biased in every way that benefited the IPC. He could not help but despise his position.

But what could Ratio do? His name was only just beginning to be known, and while in academic circles he was a man of great repute and curiosity, it had still taken half a decade of consistent work to simply secure a position as a lecturer in Veritas Prime. His position was still shaky, and the higher-ups had eager eyes to see what he could accomplish, and equally eager eyes to abscise him if he could not. When the IPC had come to him with the offer to work under the Intelligentsia Guild, he knew that to bolster his image, he had to swallow his pride and accept.

The streets wound upon themselves like spools of thread. As he made his way down their forking paths, he mentally followed the set of instructions given to find the meeting venue where their liaison—Ceija Dika—sat.

‘Look for the central market; you’ll find a tailor’s shop. Take the right path with the archway…’

The market was easy enough to find, slightly more dense than the walking streets. Textiles and money exchanged hands, kids with fruit sat perched on stacked crates of the same. Ratio hadn’t come to sightsee, however, and he muscled through the crowd quickly.

‘Left at the centre courtyard, and you’ll find yourself at three alleyways. Take the leftmost one and then the sixth exit from the right.’

Ratio slipped under some lintels from the market to the central courtyard, but when confronted by what should have been three alleyways, he found four. Confused, he retraced his steps, but found them to be correct. New construction, perhaps? A good thing he opted to scout out the location prior. He went down the leftmost corridor.

In the narrow streets, colourful doors ran parallel to each other with hardly a metre of distance between the next. The bends were tight enough to force Ratio to walk sideways, and he felt a press of tension in his lungs. Just before the alleyways grew thin enough to devour him, they tapered out into an exit.

He found himself in another courtyard hemmed by portly buildings on each side. Some peddlers and merchants made conversation under coloured tents. They looked at ease, leaned against walls, sharing laughs more than goods. And yet, the moment Ratio had entered, a strange hush fell over the place. Unlike the market, people were not keen to avoid him; rather, he was pinned to the wall behind him with a dozen stares.

Ratio knew how he looked, donned in a bright blue IPC-issue, garish against the khaki landscape. Of all the tribes in Sigonia, the ones in Kaeri had benefited the most from Oswaldo’s scheme, and it still seemed they harboured reservations. Excellent.

It would’ve been unwise to ignore the unease in his gut, but more unwise to act as if he did not belong here without purpose. As long as he was in Oswaldo’s retinue, there was little anyone could do to him. And so, he raised his chin, and walked ahead.

Immediately, he knew this was not where he was supposed to be. The walls of the buildings seemed purposefully nondescript, bereft of the mandalas and facades that adorned the others. An arrogant local lord would never live in something so banal, meaning the instructions he’d been given were incorrect. Ratio let out a sigh. Human error never failed to surprise. Perhaps he should’ve stomached the bile and followed Oswaldo in the end. At least then, he could’ve watched in satisfaction as Oswaldo traced the steps he did and realised his time had been wasted.

Ratio counted the homogeneous buildings until he reached the sixth. It could be that the error was common, and speaking with the residents inside would give him some clarity on where he was supposed to go.

He slipped inside.

The darkness closed around him like a vice. The heavy maroon curtain behind him swished into place, and the sounds of the street were dissolved into silence. His eyes took several moments to adjust, though the smell was what hit him first—perfume, heady and thick, almost in violation of his sinuses. It smelt of nectar and figs, but artificially so.

He sucked a sharp breath and brought his chalk into his grip, its blue light working to illuminate his surroundings—somewhat. Waves of wine-red velvet covered the tiles in front of his feet, and if he raised his head, he could see agates and various other cheap gemstones hung from the ceiling in long strings. Silks ran like streamers from wall to wall. Squinting, he could just about gauge the back of the room. It would have been around the size of his bedroom back on Veritas Prime.

At the far end of the chamber, several plush pillows and divans had been set upon a carpet of red, trays of pewter and copper candelabras, dishes and cups arranged in front of them. Arranged—that was a good word to use. The whole scene, now appearing rather cosy from the dim light flickering from behind the maroon curtain, felt organised as would a set for a play. For what, beyond a facsimile of luxury, Ratio could not tell. But he did not care; there was no one he could ask here for directions, and that was that.

He clicked his tongue and reached to pocket his chalk when the curtains fluttered open once more. The intruding rays caught off something at the far end of the room. Ratio’s thoughts stilled as he narrowed his gaze. Or someone. Two eyes met his across the dark. Large, terrified eyes, a colour so bright and startling they made the skin on his nape crawl. Even in the jet dark, the unnatural things glowed with their own inner light, their pinpricked diamond pupils trained on him with sharp awareness.

The word came to rest on his tongue before he could even consciously will it. Avgin.

Effectively extinct. A laconic voice-to-text module played from a waterproof speaker at the corner of Ratio’s bath. Arm perched on this side of the tub, he scrolled through his codex with laze. Subject to mass events of terrorism by the Katican tribes and discrimination from other Sigonian sects, the Marketing Department’s negligence has subjected the Avgin race to history.

There were only a handful of photos, even if their rumours and depictions about the Avgini sprawled far and wide; tucked in some old IPC brief, Avgini prisoners of war trapped in IPC holding cells, documented and tagged before passing away from the sheer stress of the ordeal. The same petrified, magenta-blue eyes blown white by the camera flash.

He’d cut off the speaker halfway through a sentence. Ratio had heard the articles a dozen times over.

Now, two weeks later and well into their mission, Ratio zeroed in on the living Avgin cowering in the corner of the room. At once, his mind began counting the myriad ways in which this could go very wrong. This Avgin was likely a thief, and Ratio was a man who’d caught him. Cornered mice tended to fight. His breath caught as he took a step back.

“I’m leaving.” Ratio’s tone was cautious, his hands raised in the hopes the Avgin would not escalate. If he ran outside, the Avgin should not follow. He couldn’t—not if he valued his life. In Kaeri, Katican or Avgin, the sympathy for you was the same. Step by step, he inched towards the entrance.

There was no sharp burst of movement as Ratio had expected, nor a scuffle to flee.

If anything, something fell in the Avgin’s gaze, and when Ratio pulled back the curtain to let the light of day seep in, the boy who sat before him only looked tired. He had soft blonde hair that fell to his shoulders, jagged, as if cut with a dull knife, a face so young it could not have been past twenty-one. Amidst the set of pretty embroidery work and jewellery, he looked paltry in his rags.

He gave no reaction.

Something tugged at Ratio. The Avgin was in no rush to leave. There were no jewels in his hands. No greed or desire in his eyes. This, Ratio decided, could not be a thief.

It was then he noticed that the Avgin was breathing in laborious and incomplete breaths. One of his pale, slender wrists clutched against his stomach. Ratio had attended one too many patients not to know when someone was hiding something.

“You are injured.” Ratio pushed the curtain open to let in the light. Out of instinct, he walked towards the divan the boy sat upon and reached for his clutched arm. Apprehension flickered across the Avgin’s face as he shied away from his touch. Ratio paused and retracted his hand.

“Your stomach.” Ratio gestured with his eyes, “If you are wounded, I need to see the injury. I am a doctor.”

There was no recognition in the boy’s eyes. His gaze was half-lidded in ready acceptance, though he was curled away, already half folded into himself. Ratio exhaled. He should’ve understood from the rags that this Avgin was not part of the numbered Sigonians who could speak Universalis. Only the few fortunate had the benefit of a formal education, nor had Sigonian been established as a common enough tongue to be stored in the Synesthesia Beacon.

He signed out the best approximation of doctor he could—raising his hands in surrender, then gesturing out a wound and the process of tending it.

“I can help you. Will you allow me to look?”

Whether the boy got the message or not was hard to tell. He looked unsure, much to Ratio’s vexation. He pondered what else he could do to make him understand, now cursing he never had the interest to accompany his fellow scholars to bars to play charades. He switched to performing a check for a fever on himself, pressing a hand to his forehead, his cheek, his nape. Ratio’s display earned him yet another confused furrow of a brow. He sighed loudly, snatched a pillow from beside the Avgin, and started performing CPR, then gestured to himself.

“Doctor.” Ratio urged, exasperated. He punctuated every other word with a compression on the pillow. “I’m running low on signs, Avgin. Pray tell me you get my message.”

Despite his brows remaining hesitant, an amused smile touched the boy’s pointed features. Perhaps the Avgini did not know what CPR was, and all he’d accomplished was making himself look rather silly. At the least, the boy seemed to grasp that Ratio wasn’t a threat. An airy chuckle escaped his lips as he allowed the hand on his stomach to fall to his side.

Ratio’s eyes widened. Red like paint coated the underside of his arm, and his tunic was soaked through. Without wasting a second, he marched to where the boy sat and fell to the ground in front of him to assess the damage.

He didn’t wait for permission. With knees pressed into the pillows below him, Ratio rolled the hem of the Avgin’s tunic to reveal the wound. There was a violent splash of crimson against his skin, older, sensitive scar tissue freckled amongst the rest. Miraculously, it was only a dermis-level graze missing the subcutaneous tissue by a hair, though its length could not be overstated, reaching from hip bone to navel. He could not explore it further without sanitised and gloved hands. What was immediately evident was that the boy needed urgent medical care. The wound appeared several hours old, and the chance of infection would only double with each passing hour.

The whole while, the Avgin watched him closely. Dark curled lashes spooled over his pupils like ink, and his lips remained parted by a hair. The fear that had been there just a moment prior was gone, replaced by a look that felt assessing. Intelligent and curious, like a desert fox sizing up a shrew. The boy must’ve been a few years his junior, but even still, the intensity of the gaze made the hands resting on his tunic falter.

In the back of his mind, Ratio recalled the crude words spoken about the Avgini. Pliant, beautiful souls whose words would lace you as quickly as their god-given allure. Two-faced schemers. Darlings and whores.

Ratio never did buy into such uncouth remarks, but matching the Avgin’s stare, even malnourished and hazed from blood loss, he could see how easily the stereotypes could take root.

“I have first aid supplies in my tent.” He managed to get out, more so as a reminder to himself. He let the fabric fall back into place, rose, and gestured out of the tent, “Come. I can treat you there better.”

The Avgin made no attempt to move.

Ah, how foolish of him. Ratio pulled the blue IPC-issue blazer off his shoulders and laid the fabric gingerly over the boy’s shoulders. It swallowed his fragile frame like a maw. “This should be big enough to carry over your head. No one will have to see your face.”

Pale hands came to hold the blazer where it flowed past his ears. The Avgin peeked up from under and blinked at him in what Ratio would’ve called pity.

Still, he did not move.

Understanding his words would be lost on the boy, Ratio sighed, and opted to sling an arm around his back to lift him to his feet. His mind ran a tracklist of all the things he’d need, what he could make the best use of, how long he’d have to keep him in his tent, but all thought halted when, after a few steps forward, he was met with resistance.

The boy had stopped walking, feet planted firmly. He peered at Ratio with a mirthless smile. Ratio was about to urge him onwards, but the Avgin shifted his foot, and the chime of metal ate his words. Upon the dark floor, a glint of light caught against iron. A chain. Ratio followed its arc and found the origin upon the young man’s ankle. The thick manacle had inflamed the skin of his leg till it cried red. Rusted and dark, it was much too heavy for a boy his size.

Now that the Avgin was stood well in the light, when Ratio’s eyes rose, he caught the edge of black on his neck; the telltale sign of a commodity code seared into his flesh. The black ink was unmistakable—scrawled in the same global format used for everything as trivial as lumber and stone to priceless treasures. To find it on the skin of a man made his own crawl. Understanding made his eyelids flicker, and at once, the beautiful, if falsified scene of luxuries and comfort before him felt grotesque.

He did not know Sigonia had a slave trade, with their own people at that. One would’ve assumed their revulsion for Avgini would’ve granted them the mercy of death, but no. Human greed was as consistent as its incompetence.

“I…” Ratio stopped himself from saying any pointless platitudes.“…Remain here. I will bring the supplies to you.”

His voice came out stripped of its usual register, landing somewhere quieter than he intended. He only realised the foolish unnecessity of his words afterwards, thankful the boy could not understand them.

He hesitated a breath longer, then rushed out of the room without looking back.

⟐

The walk back to the IPC encampment on the city's western edge was twenty-four minutes. He used them poorly—mind running the same circuit, arriving at the same conclusions, and finding no new exits. Thus was fact; he could not do anything to help the Avgin boy. Were he to free him, the town would take one look at those eyes and send him right back, if not just put an end to him. Were he to raise a case with his liaison, it would threaten the mission’s diplomacy. Taking him with them was not an option. Oswaldo, similarly, was no such understanding man.

Sweat broke across Ratio’s brow, but his hands were too busy unzipping his bags to wipe it off. What a pathetic situation. Ratio grimaced as he fumbled to grab what he needed from his supplies. Gauzes, adhesive, antiseptic, antibiotics, anti-inflamma—Gah. He snatched the whole first aid kit. His hands shook in their place. All this education, and all he could offer a slave was first aid.

The boy had not moved from the divan. He was sat half on his hip, half supported by his arm, his right, still lazily wrapped around his waist.

Ratio walked past him to open the curtains. Immediately, flush noon light flooded the room, causing the boy to squint. In front of him rested what appeared to be a small game board that Ratio hadn’t noticed before. On it, two-toned pieces akin to chess, but rather than a grid, the board was round with concentric disks propagating from a central point. He was rotating one of the outer pieces absently between his fingers when Ratio turned back to him.

The Avgin boy offered him a quaint smile, a brief wince following its wake. Legs stretched out in an elegant sprawl and hands musing with the game, he did not appear to be a patient in need of care. Ratio found it deeply unnerving how, minus the slight hiccup in his breathing, he appeared unaffected by the injury on his sternum.

Ratio cleared his head and quickly got to work, dropping to one knee to retrieve what he needed. The Avgin followed the movement, watching with focused eyes as Ratio retrieved a bottle of antiseptic and gauze from his first aid kit.

“Bandages.” Ratio raised his right hand with the gauze and motioned to wrap an injury around his free hand.

The Avgin looked pleased, set the game board to his right, and raised his arm to allow Ratio to work.

Ratio hesitated before continuing, “I need to clean the wound first.” He raised the left with the antiseptic bottle, “With this. Can I proceed?” The nondescript brown bottle did not seem to please the Avgin just as much, but he swallowed and kept his hand raised.

Ratio set the first aid kit next to the game board, kitted up, and got to work. Lifting his tunic again, he was treated to the sight of the wound. Now that the alarm had subsided, he could be more critical. The skin surrounding it was red with splotched blood, but he was no longer bleeding. Good. Through the mess, he could tell it was a clean laceration, possibly 3-4 hours since it was inflicted. Reaching in with tweezers, he extracted small bits of shrapnel, flushing the wound with saline, then antiseptic.

He’d treated enough patients to know it was painful, but Ratio’s limited toolkit and the Avgin race’s unexplored physiology meant he couldn’t risk an allergic response to anaesthetics, especially so with a man who couldn’t communicate. The Avgin, whether by unnatural pain tolerance or tremendous will of self, kept his lips pressed and idled around his surroundings without complaint. Nevertheless, his body betrayed him, flinching whenever Ratio ran over the gash in small, fitful motions.

“I apologise.” He exhaled when the boy jerked again, “It should not be long.”

Ratio noticed when the boy’s gaze fell upon his first aid kit, curious fingers sifting through its belongings, perhaps as a way to distract himself. Mild worry pressed into his throat: “Careful.”

The boy perked up at this, raising what he had in his hand as if a convict caught in a crime. A sheer plastic satchet crinkled under his hold. It held several individually packaged suturing needles, already threaded and ready for use. The Avgin tilted his head to the side, as if asking a question. Ratio was pleasantly surprised that the boy was able to identify what they were.

“No,” Ratio shook his head, “You don’t need those.”

Lecturer’s instinct had him ready to explain why he didn’t need them, the minutiae between various types of injuries and their treatment, and a horde lot more. A curious student was Ratio’s preferred student after all, and Ratio had to bite his tongue to keep the words in. The boy wouldn’t understand it, and all he would have accomplished would be wasting his breath.

Ratio sighed and shook his head again, “Be fortunate you don’t require stitches.”

The boy seemed to catch his tone and placed the needles back, and yet in the same motion, picked up several small glass ampoules and shook their contents.

Ratio was a lot less amused by this. He hissed and snatched the things from his hands, eyes wide, “Those are not toys.” He quickly placed them back in their bag and moved it a foot away from the boy, “Unless you desperately yearn to be knocked out for a day and a half, if your heart does not fail first.”

Laughter, sudden and unrepentant, spilt out of the boy, much to Ratio’s chagrin. Safety was not a shared concern, it seemed.

He grumbled under his breath with heavy exasperation, “Perhaps that is your wish.”

Ratio fell back into his work. The wound had been cleaned and now was to be dressed. One hand held the start of the bandage at the man’s side; the other looped it around his waist. An ocean of scars ran across the expanse. So many, that it was difficult not to let his mind wander. If even a third of those injuries were the scale of this one, and if the care he’d received was just as negligent, he should have been dead a dozen times over. It was borderline miraculous. Ratio didn’t, however, allow his mind to imagine just how this boy, who’d hardly just become a man, could’ve acquired such a plethora of them.

There was enough guilt for him to shoulder as it was.

The Avgin was humming something now, seemingly adjusted to his presence, and bored out of his wits now that Ratio had quarantined him away from the first aid kit. It was a pleasant sound, and yet unlike any of the hymns Ratio’d heard in the files on Sigonian culture. He wondered how many people who’d recognise the song remained.

Relaxed, the young man appeared rather pretty. His face was devoid of any of the ugly scarring of his body, and combined with the knowledge of this room, Ratio could not ascertain whether this fact was a sadder one or not. There was a wise maturity in his eyes Ratio seldom found even in his scholarly associates. That was only sadder still.

Observing the brand on his neck more carefully, he was astonished he was able to make out the numerals as Universalis. 34—it read—and the revelation was a shock to his core. One could only infer it meant that the trafficking operation extended far past the reaches of Sigonia. The thought of it made him taste bile. How many Avgin were in circulation around the cosmos? Scared, alone, light years from home? The IPC had held their Avgini in low-priority substandard holding cells—crude, but miles more than what any other entity would give—and even then, the stress had killed most of them.

The boy hummed a particularly high note and pulled Ratio from his thoughts. Ratio’s hands had been frozen in place for the past few seconds, but the boy hadn’t seemed to notice, now busied with the circular game board Ratio had spied earlier.

Wound care. His mind supplied. You have to show him how to take care of the injury. Think of what you can control.

Ratio finished the last loop of the bandage and pressed the end flat against his side, smoothing the adhesive strip into place with his thumb. He held it there a moment longer than necessary, before he sat back on his heels and reached into his first aid kit.

"You'll need to clean it." He held up a saline bottle between two fingers, then pointed to the wound. "Wash. Here."

He mimed the motion—tilting the bottle, a slow pour, the sweep of a hand across skin. Then he pointed to the boy, repeated the action, and set the bottle aside. He retrieved a folded square of gauze from the kit and pressed the Avgin’s fingers around it.

"Hold. And press." He flattened his own hand over his briefly, then withdrew.

The Avgin watched each movement carefully. He was trying to understand, a welcome alternative to his laissez-faire attitude about his injury earlier.

Ratio took a clean bandage from the kit and wrapped it once around his own wrist to demonstrate. "Wrap." He held up the roll and offered it. The Avgin took it and held it correctly without being shown twice.

“Take these.” Ratio presented him a sachet of strong antibiotics, “Two. If the wound becomes inflamed.” He pointed to the wound, then to the burgundy plush pillows surrounding them. Ratio raised his brows in question. Do you understand?

The young man looked at him steadily and gave the smallest nod. It had the quality of a concession, but the crease of his eye revealed slight humour too. Yes, I know what I'm doing, you may stop fussing.

Ratio cleared his throat. “Good.”

The tension in his shoulders unspooled now that the crisis was averted, and he rose to sit upon the divan. Two cups sat abandoned near the pillows, one tipped on its side, a dark ring staining the velvet beneath it. The mattress held the smell of old cigar smoke and perfume like a lover.

Ratio’s business was not fully concluded yet. There was one more thing he had to ask. He felt for the small rice-grain-sized bump at the back of his neck and powered his Synesthesia Beacon off.

“Ceija,” Ratio began. The Sigonian name was messy on his tongue, but he didn’t want the beacon mincing the name and pushed through, “Ceija Dika. Do you know where I can find her?” He mimed the gesture for out, pointing through the curtain, then he looked at the Avgin and waited. Their liaison was a local politician—she’d only just risen to power, and he hoped the name would ring familiar.

Thankfully, for the first time in the whole interaction, the Avgin’s eyes widened with recognition. He moved the game board between the two of them and signed back.

He gestured out, following which his hand moved left. Out, then left. Straight—an unhurried, deliberate motion, his forearm cutting a clean line through the air. Left again. Straight. He paused. His brow creased in concentration as his arms hung loose in the air. Then, he brought both hands together above his head, fingertips touching, and bent them into a curve.

Under an arch.

Ratio nodded slowly as he pieced together the instructions. He’d been given the wrong alley; that much was clear now. There was still a chance this man’s instructions were incorrect too, but an instinctual part of Ratio did not believe so. He seemed confident, and it was not as if this bound slave could harm an IPC delegate by providing some awry instructions.

“Thank you.”

The Avgin seemed to understand the intention and nodded back.

Ratio drummed his fingers against his thigh. Well, he should leave now, should he not? There was nothing else to do, and the meeting ticked nearer still—his watch informed him he had four hours on the dot. Every second he spent stuck upon the divan felt more contrived.

Ratio found his discarded blazer and slipped it on. It was still warm from where it lay next to the Avgin.

Right. This was where he’d purge the memory from his mind, memory of dangling nazars and eyes like jewels, the iron manacles and his worthless grief, and leave. It should have been, and yet Ratio found himself unwilling to go, whether it be some lingering artefact of his guilt, or worry that this slave-boy would injure himself again. Irrationality was a consequence of being alive and thinking. Even Ratio was a victim.

Before he could make up his mind, he heard a bark of laughter from his right. Ratio startled and turned to find the Avgin doubled over with mirth. He blinked. The conflict on his face must’ve been incredibly noticeable for the Avgin to find it funny.

When Ratio only stared back at him, confused, the boy scoffed and reached behind him to grab something. In his hands were one of the two-toned pieces from the game board.

Oh.

“I don’t…” Ratio pressed his lips into a tight line. He peered at his watch for an excuse, but it dutifully told him he still had four hours remaining. He considered this. He had been searching for an excuse to stay—some irrational, yet empathetic sector of him, at the least. Perhaps he ought to indulge it. It was a sorry excuse, but he was just a mundane man, and he conceded to take the piece.

He turned it over between his fingers—ivory-pale, a bulbous head atop a tapered column, worn smooth at the top where many thumbs had worried it before his.

“I don’t know how to play.”

The young man scoffed again, as if to say obviously, then moved to reset the board.

Ratio shifted closer as he set the match. Gingerly, the Avgin plucked the piece from Ratio’s hand and set it right in the centre, opposite an identical piece in a darker wood. Seven pieces to a side, the two ‘kings’ at the centre of the innermost ring, opposing each other across a thin band of lacquered wood.

When the board was set, the Avgin looked up. He pressed a finger to the dark king—his own—and moved it one notch along the ring. Then he looked at Ratio with raised brows. Like this.

Ratio copied the motion with his own piece, and the Avgin gave a small, satisfied tilt of his chin. He spoke something, a single syllable sound of affirmation. Correct.

Then, he moved the next.

The Avgin was surprisingly apt at delivering instructions, more so than Ratio would’ve expected from an ethnic group with a language so different from his. A whole galactic universe apart, and they could still communicate. Fascinating.

Thus, over the span of half an hour, through small vocables and words, the rules revealed themselves. The game before him was a satisfying thing devoid of any luck and probability. The outer rings moved with more freedom but held less power; the inner pieces were sluggish but decisive. Captures happened by displacement rather than removal—you pushed a piece out of its ring entirely. He would have likened it to a form of drawback chess or a series of Zugwangs.

Ratio had learned drawback chess from his mother upon the perpetually sun-warmed marble countertops of their apartment in the upper quarter of Veritas Prime. She'd taught him on a travel set, the pieces magnetic so they'd hold on any surface. The board was often arranged on their kitchen counter because the table was always covered in her work. She’d like to keep the kitchen clean when they’d play, smiling with wrinkled eyes as she’d devour his pieces with clever witticisms. The cleanest place in the house is where you learn to think, she’d told him.

He hadn't beaten her until he was sixteen.

Here, now, with the board rested between himself and a slave on a silk divan in a dim room on a planet most of the universe had chosen to forget, he felt the old confidence return. His hands moved with an ease that surprised him. Three moves in, he'd established a clean mid-board structure. Four moves in, and he could see the shape of the endgame. He glanced up to find the Avgin watching not the board, but Ratio; a clever, lopsided smirk rested on his lips.

Ratio coughed and focused back on the game.

Games were just another form of language, shifting and splitting and growing as they bounced from trade port to trade port. It would not be unlikely if the etymology of this game were indeed chess. He made a mental note to look into Sigonian game culture when he returned—if such documentation even existed. Given the systematic erasure of the last two decades, he suspected it did not.

Pieces danced a slow waltz around each other, switching the hands of many partners until they took their leave outside the stage of the board. Halfway through the game, most of Ratio’s entourage had been retired, the boy’s darker wood pieces numbering his two to one. It was no matter. Ratio had been a newcomer to this game, and he was never one to find frustration in a loss, only a learning moment.

Throughout the whole match, he had been more preoccupied with the thought of noting down a reproduction of the board and rules, how he would go about jotting those specifications down, what channels he could go through to get the information published and accessible. He acknowledged the loss with a small hm, and began to help the boy pack away his belongings.

The Avgin, however, seemed to have different plans. He placed a gentle hand over Ratio’s own, tossing him a lopsided smile. With the other, he reached out and took the ivory king—Ratio's king—turned it once between his fingers, and held it out toward him with another, questioning tilt of the head. New game?

Ratio assessed him for a moment. The Avgin gave no obvious tells, but something in Ratio told him this was an eager request.

The afternoon had grown unhurried around them, the light through the open curtain now angled toward amber. His watch sat on his wrist—three hours. There was time.

Ratio nodded.

The Avgin’s eyes widened in joy. However, before resetting the board, he leaned over and stuck his hand beneath the mattress of the divan, and after a few moments of ruffling, pulled out a couple of somethings the size of a thumb, sliding them forward as one would chips. Two hammered copper coins spotted with hints of patina winked back at him. Tanbas—the base currency in Sigonia, now being phased out as the planet adopted the universal IPC Credit system.

Ratio stared at the two shimmering copper coins for a confounded second before shoving the coins back his way.

"No," Ratio said firmly. He gestured toward the coins. "Keep them."

The Avgin watched his refusal and only smiled.

"I do not gamble.” Ratio emphasised with more force.

The Avgin slid the coins back.

"I said no."

The coins came back again.

Ratio stared at him, incredulous. Only a moment ago he had been praising the young man’s smarts, and now the slave was betting more money than he’d see in months with a stranger who had enough to bathe in. That said young man met his stare with equanimity, head rested in his palm. A crease had appeared at the corner of his eye—not quite a smile, but the suggestion that one was available, should the moment warrant.

It was curious. In this instant, Ratio was reminded of Oswaldo. Only a touch, and only the qualities in him he liked—his composure and easy dominance. To find them in a slave was something else.

Ratio exhaled and reached into his coat pocket. He produced three of his own tanbas and placed them beside the other two. 

The Avgin didn’t take his eyes off Ratio as a new match began.

The rules were known, and thus the next games unfolded in a register that was faster and much less polite. But now that Ratio had a taste of how the game played, the Avgin was no match for him. He lost quite quickly. The boy seemed shocked by the fast victory, even if only slightly perturbed. He ran his tongue across the inside of his cheek before reaching under his mattress to bet more.

Ratio raised a brow, loathed to see the boy had not learnt his lesson. He slid forward his own tanba. Twice more, the boy placed a small bet of one tanba, and twice more Ratio won the pot.

Given his subpar performance now, the first game had seemingly been a fluke. Perhaps Ratio had misjudged him, and he was but a fool.

It was a disappointing thought. He had wanted the boy to be clever. He had wanted the first game to mean something—a meeting of minds across an impossible divide. Instead, he was watching a young man fritter away his paltry savings on a game he clearly did not know how to play proficiently, and its tragedy was so mundane that Ratio could hardly bear a look at him.

The young man did not seem to think so in the slightest. He was just as animated as he had been in the round of his victory, small little curses slipping past his lips every time Ratio took another one of his pieces; at least that was how Ratio interpreted the half-hissed sentences. He was a laugher, too—loud and pronounced, infectious even towards a spoilsport like Ratio himself. He would’ve never guessed it from the pallid expression he had at first. Then again, if Ratio had guessed he was a thief, it was not unlikely the Avgin had assumed him to be someone else too—someone worthy of that expression.

The boy drummed his fingers against his ankle, the iron of his shackle clinking softly with each movement. The other hand had migrated to his jaw, fingers scratching absently at the underside of his chin as he studied the board with narrowed eyes. Their game had resulted in another loss for the boy, the fourth in a row, and the pile of coins in front of Ratio had grown to a modest ten tanbas. Before Ratio could object, the Avgin reached to place another tanba. Or that is what Ratio assumed he’d do, until he retallied the ten tanbas placed before him.

Ratio’s eyes widened. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

The Avgin did not answer except with a smile—that same infuriating, corner-of-the-eye crease taunting him in its sincerity.

Ratio worried his lip. What wicked fortune that nothing ensnared a scholar more than curiosity itself. The boy’s glimpses of wit could not be so easily discounted, and no matter how objective the scientist, there was always a hypothesis they preferred. Ratio placed all the tanbas in his winning pile forward, as well as an incentive of two more. He bet on his hypothesis being true.

“Fine.” He moved his piece first with a click of his tongue. “Let’s play.”

Play, they did.

The stakes changed the pressure in the air between them—Ratio felt it before he could name it, a tightening, the way a lecture hall quieted when he began to speak. Twenty-two tanbas sat between them now, an absurd sum for a boy who kept his savings folded into a mattress, and yet the Avgin's hands did not shake as he set his pieces. If anything, they had grown steadier.

Ratio bent his full attention to the board. He had spent the last three games cataloguing patterns: the boy’s tendency to advance from the second ring rather than the first, a preference for direct captures over oblique ones, a habit of tapping the vacated space twice with a forefinger before withdrawing his hand. All was information he could use.

The boy selected an outer piece with hardly any skin in the game and slid it two notches wide, to a position that accomplished, as far as Ratio could tell, nothing at all. He frowned at the board. A wasted tempo, surely. Rightly, he capitalised on it and moved his own attack to the gap the boy's carelessness had left open. The Avgin only hummed and let him.

For a while, it seemed a mercy. Ratio's pieces advanced in clean, deliberate lines. His mother would have nodded from across their kitchen counter. Ratio felt the corner of his mouth pull upward against his better judgment. This Avgin was not his mother. Victory was in sight.

An amused chuckle filled the air between them as the Avgin made his move. Ratio’s gaze flicked upwards, but he only found the Avgin lounging across the divan calmly. When he looked back down, he found the board wholly recast. Ratio blinked. His brain connected the dots as one would a sentence they failed to contextualise on the first read. Slowly, he stepped back to see the web he’d found himself in.

Ah.

Ratio could not help the laugh that escaped him. In five moves, the Avgin would have him, and there was no means of escape that did not pull the web tighter. This had been the true culmination of seven games’ worth. There was hardly a point in continuing to play. The boy seemed doubly pleased, stealing Ratio’s prior smug expression to wear for himself.

He noted the boy could’ve done the manoeuvre in any of their prior games but instead chose to wait until now, chose to play Ratio as much as he did the pieces.

“…You are very good," Ratio said to himself as much as to the boy, shaking his head to accept defeat, “Ten points.”

The boy tossed him a self-satisfied, knavish grin before pocketing his winnings with grace. Ratio would’ve returned the sum regardless, but the victory was well earned now. Avarice, or some similar emotion, sparkled in the Avgin’s unholy gaze, but Ratio had a mind far away. He did not think he would ever find a mind capable enough on this planet of dust and exploit to keep him entertained. The young man before him was clever, devastatingly so.

It’s… He clenched his hand hard enough to form crescents upon the skin. It was a waste.

He thought of his students—a trove of minds as bright as the last, each from a family wealthy enough to own their name. One would have called them wise. And yet, how many more deserving lay trapped in rooms like these? How many could afford a room still? Let alone an education?

The guilt that burned in his heart was a terrible thing. How content the boy seemed, counting his coins and happy like a well-fed animal resting by a master’s foot, unknowing that he was forever looking at light through a keyhole.

His watch caught the light as he shifted his wrist—thirty minutes.

How terrible was he. Now, he had to walk out of this room and back into his life as if nothing had transpired, as if he had not spent the better part of an afternoon matching wits with a mind that deserved so much more than the walls that contained it. The injustice of it ate at him like an oil spill, coated his throat in suffocating thick waves.

Ratio rose suddenly.

The Avgin looked at him with startled, wide eyes. The cunning that had danced there moments before had vanished entirely.

Without meaning to, Ratio raised a hand to his chest. His fingers pressed flat against his sternum, over the place where his name badge would sit if he were wearing his university lanyard. The gesture was formal, old-fashioned, the kind of introduction one made at academic functions and diplomatic receptions.

He spoke in a tone bereft of its usual attitude. Soft and unsure.

“My name is Veritas Ratio.”

It was a pointless offering. What good was the name of a scholar to a boy in iron shackles? Tomorrow, the boy would likely suffer another wound, and this time, Ratio would not be there with a medical kit to halt the infection. He was a man of vast influence, intellect, and interest, yet standing at the edge of this divan, he had never felt so utterly powerless.

And yet, the clever boy held Ratio’s gaze without a tremor, his gemstone eyes catching the dim light. He smiled, placed the coins to his side, and his lips parted to answer. “Kakavasha.”

As if to mirror Ratio, his clasped fingers had come to rest against the roughspun fabric of his tunic.

Ratio stared at him, mouth parted ever so slightly as he tasted the syllables. He committed the name, and the brilliant mind behind it, to his perfect memory.

“Good luck, Kakavasha,” Ratio answered.

He left before he could hear a response.

⟐

The meeting occurred without fanfare. Ratio spoke where he had to and bit his riotous tongue for the rest of it. Oswaldo should be ecstatic with his star bootlicking performance. Ratio almost had as much utility as recording. Truly, who else could recite concessionary numbers with such bloodless neutrality as he.

Ceija paid little heed to Ratio outside of Oswaldo, and when the meeting concluded, she offered a brief, sniped farewell, then took her leave.

That left Oswaldo and Ratio alone in the antechamber, waiting on an associate to finish collating reports. Outside the window, Kaeri's rooftops burned gold with the falling sun, the temple bells tolling somewhere distant and unhurried, indifferent to treaties signed in rooms like this one.

Somewhere, in a dark room, a boy would hear them too.

Ratio found he could let it lie no longer.

"I ask the IPC to open an investigation into the trafficking of Avgin persons on this planet." The words shot out of him loud and straight.

“Hmm?” Oswaldo looked up from the cufflink he was straightening, tilting his head as if he did not hear.

“I spoke quite clearly.”

Oswaldo considered him for a second, and Ratio wondered if the man would even deign him with a response.

“That you did, doctor,” he finally conceded, to Ratio’s disbelief, “But did you not hear? No documented Avgin remain, Veritas. It is terribly sad.”

Ratio’s brow flickered, "That is functionally false. I only recently—"

“The Katicans, such beastly things.” Oswaldo cut Ratio off with a sigh, “But we mustn’t contaminate the rest of Sigonian’s with such equally baseless accusations.”

Ratio scowled, “An accusation is not corroborated by evidence.”

“Doctor.” Oswaldo turned to face him. A few strands of his salt-and-pepper hair lay askew across his forehead. “What is it you mean to say?”

“There are people here who need help only the Corporation can provide.” Ratio pleaded with his eyes. “Surely we are not so impoverished of funds.”

Oswaldo was silent for several seconds before he let out a deep sigh, “The IPC is not in the business of helping invisible men.”

He said it almost gently. There was, for one unsettling moment, sorrow in the old dog's tin-coloured eyes, some flicker of a man who might have wished the universe was arranged otherwise. Enough that Ratio nearly forgot that his was the same hand that had helped carve Sigonia into a thing worth abandoning. Nearly forgot that pity, from a man like Oswaldo, cost him nothing and changed nothing.

“Schneider.” Ratio plea felt raw and aching.

“Vertias.” Oswaldo replied light and even, gesturing towards the returning associate, “Our documents are here.”

A man rushed over and handed Oswaldo a sheaf of papers. Oswaldo busied the man with pleasantries and mild conversation. Behind them, Ratio's fingers curled at his side. Oswaldo's laugh, when it came, held no real mirth in it—more habit than humour. He turned and beckoned Ratio to follow, cuffs immaculate, collar measured to the millimetre, already speaking of flight schedules and delays.

Ratio thought, absurdly, of the kitchen counter in Veritas Prime and of his mother. He had believed her. Believed that a sharp enough mind, wielded long enough, might eventually bend something. All the knowledge he had procured. All the good he tried, in his small and insufficient ways, to implement. Ratio tried only to find he had remained just as powerless.

Oswaldo was a thumb in his vision.

Ratio’s eyes fell to the floor, an exhale, a coda.

He followed the leash.

The ship had lifted an hour later. Ratio watched through the viewport as the sands of Sigonia thinned to a rust-coloured smear and then to nothing, swallowed by the dark between worlds.

The words he'd left behind sat still on his lips, unknown, unanswered and unanswerable.

Good luck, Kakavasha.

⟐