The small fire burned between two rocks, casting an orange glow on two tired faces, for they had walked half a day eastward after leaving the grave behind and had stopped at a bend in a dirt road between two bare hills, lighting the fire without agreeing to do so, because neither of them was hungry and neither could walk any farther, so they simply sat facing each other and looked into the flames the way two men look at something they know will end.
Rico stirred the embers with a thin stick, trying not to talk, which was not easy for him.
"I've been thinking," he said at last.
"About what?"
"About soup." He smiled a crooked smile. "Don't laugh. When I was little I believed every problem in the world could be solved by a bowl of hot soup, and then I grew up and realized it takes two."
Esteban did not laugh, though the corner of his mouth moved.
He sat on a stone with his wooden sword across his knees and both palms open above the blade, staring at the fire without seeing it, because he was seeing something farther away, a calm face with closed eyes and lips saying *I couldn't tell you anything more*, and a transparent dagger going in and coming out.
He had killed one of the Eraser's stars, and he had seen a city of empty beds and a clock stopped at the same moment, and he had read in the air that his wife and daughter were alive in a place he did not know, and yet the thing he felt most was hunger, though not the hunger of the stomach, a hunger he knew food would never satisfy, a hunger for something like a verdict, for someone to tell him *you did right* or *you did wrong*, but no one had told him anything, because Rafael was dead and Rico did not know how to say it and the stone did not speak, and only the fire was talking, in the language of burning charcoal.
"Esteban."
"Yes."
"You're doing it again."
"What?"
"Staring at nothing." Rico looked at the spot where Esteban's eyes were fixed, above the fire, where there was nothing but air and smoke. "You have a strange habit, because every time I think you're thinking, I find you looking at a place with nothing in it."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize, I like seeing a man talk to himself." He shrugged. "The only problem is that I can't tell whether I'm waiting for you to answer the air or for the air to answer you."
And at that moment the air answered.
It was not a voice but writing, which appeared between their faces above the flames, steady and unmoved by the wind, thin blue letters that gleamed like the edge of a knife:
[Choose a New Mission]
Esteban froze.
He did not lift his head or change his expression, having learned in recent weeks not to react when things appeared before his eyes, because Rico noticed everything and lying with a calm face was easier than explaining with a flustered one.
And beneath the line, the panel began to draw itself, ten rows, one under the other, each with a number and a word:
[1 — ??? — Locked]
[2 — ??? — Locked]
[3 — ??? — Locked]
[4 — ??? — Available]
[5 — ??? — Locked]
[6 — ??? — Locked]
[7 — Rafael — Completed]
[8 — ??? — Locked]
[9 — ??? — Locked]
[10 — ??? — Locked]
And across the seventh row alone ran a thin line striking out the name, as if someone had passed over it with a pen.
*Completed.*
He looked at the word for a long time.
It was very simple, dry, almost a word on a shopping list, *done*, and he imagined for a moment Rafael reading it, if he could, and laughing his gentle, hoarse laugh, and saying something about questions.
"Esteban?"
"Yes."
"Why do you look like you've seen a ghost?"
"It's nothing." He tried to smile and it came out twisted. "I was thinking of something."
"Of what?"
"Of soup."
"Ah." Rico nodded with exaggerated gravity. "That's the least a man can think of."
Only one row was lit.
[4 — ??? — Available]
The other nine were dark and shut, ringed by faint gray lines, like doors whose time had not yet come, and at the bottom of the panel, in smaller letters he had not noticed at first:
"You may choose one mission at a time."
"The reward is revealed upon completion."
Out of curiosity he tried pressing the first row, and the gray line around it shivered and a short phrase appeared:
"Locked. It will not open until the available mission is completed."
Then the third row, then the eighth, with the same answer in the same words, like a door that knew only one sentence.
He frowned.
There was something in it like a promise, because no one sets nine closed doors before a man unless he means for them to be opened one day, in the order he himself chooses and not the order chosen by the one who set them there.
Something stirred in his chest as he read the last line, though there was nothing in it to tempt him to refuse, because he knew what he would choose, having decided it the night before, when he had opened the leather notebook taken from the dead captain's belt and read a short line beneath the number four.
*The wounded ask for his name.*
And whoever knows how to bring the living back from wounds might know something about those who were hidden.
He reached out a finger slowly and pressed the lit row.
The panel trembled.
Then, as a window opens onto another room, it opened.
[New Mission: Defeat the Fourth Star]
At first there was a picture.
It was not a drawing or a painting but something closer to a reflection in water, in a thin frame of blue light, and in it a woman looked straight at him, in her late thirties or early forties, with a calm round face so warm it resembled the face of someone he had known a long time though he had never met her, dark brown hair gathered back with a white rag and small strands escaping at her neck, and honey-colored eyes holding a deep weariness and an even deeper compassion, wearing a plain white dress with no ornament and, on its breast, a piece of cloth embroidered with a small star.
She was smiling.
It was not the smile of one of the Eraser's stars but the smile of a mother opening the door to a son returning in the night.
Esteban felt his throat tighten.
*Her?*
And beneath the picture, line after line:
[Name: Unknown]
[Title: "The Mother"]
[Rank: Fourth Star]
And below that:
[Power: Healing]
"She can heal almost anyone."
[Power Level: Very High]
[Status: Lore Boss — Locked]
"Her story will not be revealed until you meet her."
He had read the word *healing* twice without understanding it, since it was a plain word with no fear in it, no threat, no cruelty, only an ability, and yet he knew that Rafael too had possessed a simple-sounding ability, one that said *melting.*
He sat studying the warm, smiling face and asking himself a question he did not want to ask:
How do you defeat someone you don't want to hate?
The question was not new to him, for he had asked it two days earlier before a thin man in a gray coat reading beside a hearth, and the answer, when it came, had cost dearly, diamond and charcoal and ground turned to mud, and he was not sure whether he had won then or whether something had been lost on the road.
The picture changed before he could find an answer.
It slid aside, and behind it rose a new panel, larger and wider, drawn in soft gray lines on a blue ground, a map.
At first it was simple, mountains drawn as packed triangles, rivers winding in lighter blue lines, and dashed roads branching in every direction, and in its western corner a small blue dot glowed gently:
[You are here]
Far to the east, beyond two mountain ranges and a broad river, stood a fixed red circular mark in a thin frame:
[Lacora — Residence of the Fourth Star]
And beneath it a small line:
[Approximate distance: two weeks.]
Esteban spread two fingers over the map, and the lines parted under them and what had been distant grew larger, and he saw rivers and passes bearing names he had never heard, Wolf Pass, the Serena River, the White Plain, and at the edge of the west, in the lower corner where he had begun, a small faded dot with a name he knew, Marina.
He stared at it a long moment.
Then, near it, two other dots, the Stone Bridge and Olmo, the three connected by a thin faded line like the traces of a journey whose every day he could no longer remember.
*How far we are from home.*
He did not say it, but something in his chest tightened and then eased, and he drew his fingers back and the map returned to its size.
He gazed at it for a long time.
Then at its bottom, in modest letters, a last note appeared:
"You may open the map whenever you wish."
It was the first sentence from this stone that carried real kindness, with no chain, no condition, no warning, only an outstretched hand saying *open it whenever you like.*
"Esteban."
"Yes."
"If you don't tell me what you're seeing, I'll start screaming."
Rico looked at him with his chin resting on his knees and in his eyes the last patience of a man who had begun counting minutes.
"I don't want to know how, or why, I only want to know where we're going."
Esteban dismissed the map with a thought, then the panel, then the picture, and everything vanished, leaving the smoke and the fire and the sunset.
"East," he said.
"Where in the east?"
"A city." He paused a moment. "Called Lacora."
"What's in it?"
"The Fourth Star."
"Ah." Rico raised his eyebrows. "The doctor."
"Yes."
"I've heard of it." Rico had straightened and his voice had changed, the voice of someone remembering a story heard at the corner of a market. "They say in the east there's a city where no one dies of sickness, you go there dying and come out laughing."
"Laughing?"
"That's what they say." He scratched his head. "One man told me nobody in it ever cries, and I don't know what he meant, I thought he was joking."
"Maybe he was joking."
"Maybe." But his eyes did not smile.
And Esteban thought, without saying it, that a city where no one cries is the kind of city one should be most afraid of.
It was the first heavy hint of that day, and neither of them noticed it.
"And how did you learn the name of the city?"
"I can't explain."
"Of course you can't." The young man sighed with feigned bitterness. "You can't explain anything, but listen, I'll follow you and I won't ask, but I ask one thing."
"What?"
"That you talk more." He looked at him with half a smile. "Your speech skill is terrible."
Esteban stared at him, and then laughed.
It was a short, sudden, real laugh, the first to come out of him since the bridge, and he laughed until he had to put his hand over his mouth, his shoulders shaking, while Rico stared at him with wary astonishment like a man watching a stone speak.
His laughter was the strangest thing that happened that day, not pure joy and not an escape but something like a long breath held for ten years and released all at once without his knowing how to stop it.
"What?" the young man said. "What did I say?"
"Nothing." Esteban wiped his eye. "Nothing, it's only... you don't know."
"I don't know what?"
"How right you are."
He put out the fire with a handful of earth, shouldered his bag, and looked toward the eastern horizon, where the sun was setting behind the mountains and dyeing the clouds the color of embers.
"Are we walking tonight?" Rico asked.
"We walk."
"Why?"
He did not answer at once, laying his hand on his chest over the blue stone that pulsed quietly, and then said in a low voice:
"Because someone is waiting at the other end of this road, and I don't know whether I'll hate her or need her."
"Who?"
"The Mother."
And an hour later, when they had moved off the dirt road and night had begun to cover the mountains, Esteban raised his head to the sky, where stars were appearing one after another, white, cold, and many.
He had not looked at them this way in years, avoiding the stars because they resembled something he could no longer bear to see.
Tonight, for the first time, they did not hurt him.
And they walked on through the dusk, one behind the other, toward the east, where two weeks of roads and two mountains and a river lay ahead, and at the end of them a city called Lacora, and a woman who smiled at whoever sought her.