Selvane never truly slept, but at three in the morning it pretended to.
The taverns on Market Street closed their doors and left a single lamp lit for the drunks who couldn’t find their way home. The city guards changed shifts, yawning. And in the great circular square where the Tower of Despair tore the sky like a black needle, the marble staircase that led up to the entrance was almost empty.
Almost.
Taesik Gu was sitting on the twelfth step, elbows on his knees, flipping a copper coin into the air. He was nineteen, with his hair shaved at the sides and a thin scar running through his left eyebrow. He wore the lead-gray coat of Expansion Reach open over his shirt, with the emblem of the ringed planet embroidered on the chest.
TING
The coin went up and came down.
TING
“You’re going to wear that coin out, tossing it like that,” said a woman’s voice behind him.
Taesik didn’t turn around.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got that nobody charges me for, Vessa. Let me play, come on.”
Vessa the Needle came down the steps with the light tread of someone who had never tripped in her life. She was a native of Selvane: tall, thin, her black hair held up in a bun pierced by two silver needles that were not just for decoration. Her hands were gloved to the elbows, and her long coat, full of pockets, clinked softly with every step: vials, dozens of them.
She stopped beside him and looked up at the Tower’s entrance, where a bluish light pulsed.
“The guard records came in,” she said. “The ones from the night of the Turn.”
“And?”
“You were right.” Vessa took a folded paper out of one of her pockets and handed it to him without looking. “Sete got in line at the right time. But she didn’t go in with our group.”
Taesik stopped the coin in midair, closed his hand over it and unfolded the paper.
It was a list of the groups that had entered the Tower in the early hours of the Turn, copied by hand by some guard clerk in hurried writing. He ran his finger down the lines until he found what he wanted.
Group 1,117 — four members. Three summoned, one native (minor). Mode: Nightmare. Exit: complete.
“Nightmare,” he read. “Complete.”
“The whole first floor, in Nightmare Mode, on the first night.” Vessa crossed her arms. “With our probe in the group. The probe that cost three firgios paid in advance to the House of Wardship, and that by now should be worth one firgio in compensation at the bottom of a bear trap.”
Taesik let out a short, dry laugh, more air than sound.
“Sete didn’t die,” he said. “The brat didn’t die.”
“That amuses you?”
“It ticks me off.” He folded the paper and put it in his coat pocket. “You know how many I’ve sent ahead, Vessa? Forty-three. Forty-three probes since the Bald Man gave me this coat. Four came back.” He tossed the coin again. TING. “Not one of them came back with a real group.”
Vessa watched him sideways, with those dark eyes that always seemed to be measuring out a dose.
“You’re angry because she got lucky.”
“I’m angry because she waited,” Taesik corrected her, and for a moment his voice lost its joking tone. “Probes don’t wait for anybody. Probes go ahead, period. If she went in with another group, it’s because she stood in line long enough for somebody to pull her in. Which means she still thinks somebody’s going to pull her in.”
He caught the coin and let it lie still on his palm.
“I stopped waiting at the door a long time ago,” he said, more to himself.
Vessa didn’t answer. She knew the story of his brother, Taeho, who had walked through a door on the fifth floor at nine years old and never come out again. Everyone in Expansion Reach knew it. Nobody talked about it around Taesik, unless they wanted to lose a tooth.
“The Bald Man wants to know who the other three are,” she said, getting back to business. “The group records don’t keep names, only numbers. But if Sete is with them, they must have gone through the Guild to register her. The Guild does keep names.”
“The Guild doesn’t sell names.”
“The Guild doesn’t.” Vessa smiled, small and sharp as the needles in her hair. “But the people who work there drink. Gamble. Have sick children.”
*
The House of Wardship of Selvane stood six blocks from the Tower, on a narrow street far too clean for that neighborhood. It was a three-story building of pale stone, with small windows and iron bars painted white so they wouldn’t look like bars. On the oak door was a bronze plaque engraved in cursive:
House of Wardship of Selvane. Here, no child goes without a home.
Inside, in an office that smelled of lavender and candle wax, Mistress Tutor Agnes Pell was pouring tea.
“Sugar, Vessa dear?”
“No, thank you.”
“You always refuse.” Agnes put two cubes in her own cup and stirred without letting the spoon touch the porcelain. She was a woman of nearly sixty, plump, with rosy cheeks and gray hair held in a fine net. She wore the gray mantle of the Curators, but with a white apron over it, embroidered with little birds. “Young people today are afraid of sweet things. They think it will make them weak.”
Vessa sat in the armchair in front of the desk, motionless, the untouched cup resting on her knee. Taesik stayed on his feet by the door, arms crossed and eyes on the floor.
He hated that office. He hated the smell of lavender. He had spent three years in that house, from seven to ten, and he could still hear Agnes’s voice in the hallway at night, counting the beds: one little bird, two little birds, three little birds.
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“So,” Agnes said, after a sip. “My Sete.”
“She’s alive,” Vessa said. “In an independent group. We’ll get her back.”
“Oh, I know you will.” The Mistress Tutor’s sweetness did not reach the back of her eyes. “But you understand my concern, don’t you? I looked after that girl for almost four years. I gave her food, a bed, I taught her to count. She is an investment. When one of my little birds flies to the wrong nest, the other little birds get ideas.”
She set the cup down on its saucer.
“Ideas are catching, Vessa dear. Far more catching than fever.”
Taesik squeezed his crossed arms until his fingers hurt.
“The advance was paid,” Vessa said, unruffled. “Three firgios. If the probe didn’t fulfill the contract, Expansion Reach answers for it.”
“The contract was with Expansion Reach, yes.” Agnes opened a drawer and took out a thick book bound in red leather. She opened it to a page marked with a ribbon and turned the book so Vessa could see. “But the girl is mine.”
On the page was a list of numbers with amounts beside them. Um. Dois. Três. Some of the numbers were crossed out with a thin, straight line. Next to the seven, in the margin, in fresher ink, someone had written: Irregular departure. Recover.
“I have nothing against Expansion Reach,” Agnes went on, gentle as a grandmother. “But if my Sete is not back in this house in thirty days, I may need to have a talk with Rare Atom about who will receive the next probes. Or with Los Tundras. They have always been so very polite.”
Vessa took a while to answer. She picked up the untouched cup, drank the cold tea in one go and set it back on the saucer.
“Thirty days.”
“You are a darling.” Agnes closed the red book. “And Taesik, my little bird.” The boy raised his eyes, against his own will. “You have grown so tall. I always knew you would be useful.”
Taesik didn’t answer. He left before Vessa got up.
*
The Temple of Roses stood at the top of Selvane’s west hill, far enough from the noise of the square that the bells could be heard. It was the Curators’ seat in the city: a building of gray marble, with slender columns and an inner garden ringed by arches, where the largest rose garden on the continent grew.
All the roses were white.
Curator Corvin was kneeling among them, the sleeves of his gray mantle rolled up to the elbows and a copper watering can in his hand. He was a man of about fifty, thin, with a narrow face and round, fine-rimmed glasses. He had a pianist’s long, clean hands, and he used them delicately to move a dry leaf away from a bud that was still closed.
“You’re thirsty, aren’t you?” he murmured to the rosebush. “Patience. Patience. Everyone will drink.”
The water fell in a thin stream onto the dark soil.
On the little stone table beside him, under the light of an oil lamp, lay an open book, smaller than the Curators’ prayer book, with a moss-green cover. The pages were divided into columns: Name. Class. Potential. Notes.
The first pages were full. Some lines had been crossed out; others had a small drawing of a rosebud beside them.
Corvin finished watering the rosebush, set down the can, dried his hands on a white handkerchief and sat on the stone bench in front of the book. He took the quill, dipped it in the inkwell and, on a fresh page, wrote in impeccable handwriting:
Kai Sehun.
He held the quill suspended over the name.
Class: unknown. The Guild could not read it. (Interesting.)
First floor in Nightmare Mode, first night. Opened the three pioneer chests. (As expected.)
Refused Joseph Rhee’s necklace. Refuses gifts. Hates owing. (Rare.)
Killed three from Expansion Reach in the skeleton woods, among them the Bald Man’s brother. No witnesses. (Clean.)
Registered as “Zero.”
Corvin paused. He tapped the tip of the quill lightly on the paper and left a little dot of ink.
“Zero,” he said out loud, to hear how it sounded. “What a curious name for someone who wants to be remembered.”
Beside the name, he drew a small rosebud. He thought for a moment and added a pair of scissors, tiny, almost invisible.
Observe. Water with care. If it grows crooked, prune.
He closed the book and went back to the roses.
“I have nothing against the weed,” he said, watering can already in hand. “It simply sprouts in the wrong bed.”
*
Gwang-cheol Byun, the Bald Man, wasn’t sleeping. He hadn’t slept properly in twelve days.
He was sitting in the office at Expansion Reach headquarters, an old grain warehouse converted on the edge of the harbor, with a half-empty bottle of soju on the desk and a photograph in his hand. The photo was creased and faded, from before Day One. It showed two boys in Greco-Roman wrestling singlets, one big and one smaller, with medals around their necks and the faces of champions.
“Gwang-su,” the Bald Man said to the photo. “You idiot.”
He was an enormous man, with a thick neck and a shaved head, his ears deformed by decades on the mat. He had come back from Erebus in the same forty-year-old body he had vanished in, with no memory of the twenty years he had spent there, and he had come back together with his brother. It had been the only good thing about that senseless return: opening his eyes on a field of concrete in 2020 and seeing Gwang-su beside him, asking what year it was.
Twelve days later, Gwang-su was dead in a woods full of skeletons, his throat cut by a polearm. The two men who had been with him, too.
No witnesses, no leads. Only the cut, far too clean.
“Boss.” A voice at the door. It was Vessa, with Taesik right behind her. “We have a lead.”
The Bald Man didn’t take his eyes off the photo.
“Talk.”
“The group that took our probe. The four of them. One of them uses a polearm. An Asian spear, according to the Guild clerk. He registered as ‘Zero.’”
The Bald Man raised his head slowly.
Vessa had seen that man break a debtor’s arm without changing his expression. She had seen him laugh while a rival begged. But she had never seen him the way he was at that moment, with red eyes, his jaw trembling and the photo clenched in his hand as if it might run away.
“Zero,” he repeated.
“We’re not sure yet that it was him.”
“I don’t need sure.” The Bald Man put the photo in his shirt pocket, over his heart. “I need a face. Find out what he looks like. Find out where he sleeps.” He stood up, and the chair groaned. “When he comes out of that Tower, I want to be on the stairs.”
“And the probe?” Taesik asked.
It took the Bald Man a moment to remember Taesik was there.
“Do whatever you want with the brat. She didn’t kill my brother.”
*
On the staircase of the Tower of Despair, almost at four in the morning, a man came down the marble steps alone.
He was tall and elegant, with black hair combed back and a neatly trimmed mustache, and he wore the dark blue uniform of Rare Atom with the golden atom on the chest. At his waist hung a slender saber with a silver hilt. He had just come back from the Tower with Lady Isolde’s team, who had gone on ahead, and not a single hair was out of place.
He was humming.
It was a slow, sad aria, full of impossible climbs, and it echoed down the empty steps. He went slightly flat on the highest notes, but he didn’t seem to mind.
At the bottom of the stairs, Taesik, on his way back from the harbor, stopped to look.
“Hey, old man. What’s that?”
The man didn’t stop coming down or stop humming. He only raised a gloved finger, asking him to wait, and finished the musical phrase. Then he showed his teeth, very white and very vain.
“Nessun dorma, ragazzo. ‘Let no one sleep.’” His accent was thick, Italian to the bone. “A principessa who forbids the whole city to sleep until she discovers the name of a stranger. Bellissima.“
“What a dumb story.”
“Forse. Perhaps.” The fencer passed him and went on toward the street, at the same strolling pace. “But I have dreamed of her every night since I came back. Of her, and of a skinny young man with long hair who holds his knife as if he were afraid of it. I have never seen his face.” He shrugged. “Such are the things of a man who lost twenty years, I imagine.”
He walked off down the deserted street and took up the aria again from where he had left off.
Taesik watched until he disappeared around the corner. Then he spat on the marble steps, shoved his hands in his pockets and went to sleep.
Up above, the Tower’s entrance pulsed once more, blue, over the steps where the Bald Man meant to wait.