They called it the Old Way for a variety of reasons. Old meaning original; old meaning venerable; old in all the positive ways something could be called old.

There were trillions of people across hundreds of worlds who followed the Old Way. Through all the generations that had come since humanity had migrated away from its home star, those of the Old Way had handed down their perspective about humanity’s place in the cosmos. They had seen their brothers and sisters reach out into the universe and change themselves drastically in the process—not that we hadn’t already been changing by the time we left Earth, but that the changes possible in the universe at large were far more radical than anything that could have happened at home.

In short hops at first, and then in leaps and bounds, humanity not only left old Sol far behind but left behind more of the things that could be called human. His useful lifespan could now be expanded from decades into centuries and with decrepitude staved off almost indefinitely. His mortality could be defrayed or short-circuited entirely via a number of technological cheats: making a periodic external backup image of the brain’s own wiring and restoring it in the event of failure; or moving the mind entirely into a perpetually-sustainable container that wouldn’t betray its owner by dropping dead.

The worlds where such things became commonplace, the Highend worlds, soon all had a few things in common. They prided themselves on their prowess; they held themselves up as the true humanity that for so long had been constrained by rotting little bodies or the prison of Earth. They looked at their less-evolved brethren with a condescending little smile and agreed that, yes, there was a place for both “lower” and “higher” men in the universe ... provided everyone understood their place. They had no problems with shirking that many more “human” things. Childhood, for instance: why bother with a childhood when you could simply instantiate any number of adults as needed, and save everyone a great deal of messy trouble and heartache? (The same measure did away with the annoyances of child-rearing as well.)

But there were still plenty who hadn’t chosen to let these things happen.

Going out into space, living there, dying there, being born there—all of that had only cemented for them all the more firmly what man’s limits were. Man wasn’t constrained by death or the limits of his body, unless he convinced himself such things were constraints in the first place. Those things were not what constrained us, but what inspired us. To try and throw away all that would only remove from our lives that many more lessons the universe had to teach us, individually and collectively. A man with dirt on his hands was more of a man than just a biological container with some intelligence bubbling in it. Birth, life and death were not prison sentences or afflictions to be cured. They were our way of acting as the very substance of the universe.

Even on my worst days, I still liked the way all that sounded.

Such a collection of ideas found its greatest power not in the constitutional documents of a state, nor in the musings of an abstract philosophy. It concentrated itself and ignited into its fullest flame only when it was a work of faith, one which took the name “Old Way” to set itself that much apart from all that was compulsively new.

Those of the Old Way saw, much as they had feared would happen, the Highend worlds turning further inwards with each century. Their great intellects, their technical prowess, were no longer about discovery but about preservation—and soon not even about preservation but mere maintenance. Why allow more people to come into being when you can simply keep the ones that already exist? Never mind that new people means new ideas, new perspectives, new muscle to build what had to be built and maintain what would always fall apart of its own accord. They could get any number of such people from the Old Way worlds, after all.

And by the time they came to that conclusion, they’d been proven right.

The Old Way worlds had no shortage of a sense of the humane over the merely human. But the centuries had allowed what was once brave and fierce to become fearful and reactionary, to let warm belief grow cold and congeal into mere dogma and catechism. Billions were ready to emigrate each year for the slightest chance to live on a Highend world, out of the sense that even living in the shadow of the Highend would be a better deal than to live on a world where all those things that seemed increasingly attractive were denied on principle—longevity, death-cheating, technologies without restrictions of either law or etiquette hemming them in. They had spent generations telling themselves they didn’t need any of that, and now they were mulling over the grim possibility that they had been just plain fools.

What no one denied was the charisma and grace of the Old Way’s spiritual leadership. Each Kathaya of the Old Way, from Kundun of Kshatriya to Ellund al-Halvand, had used the force of their personality to light that many more fires in the hearts of those following the Old Way. In many places—the more the Kathaya was around, the better—it was easy to believe the Old Way had lost none of its magnetism or power to inspire.

Then came the 16th Kathaya, Angharad, and for the first time in generations we had a Kathaya of the Old Way that didn’t simply warm a cushion back on the Old Way homeworld of Kathayagara, or let the Old Way’s Council of the Achitraka do all the grunt-work. She got up off her duff and did things. She sat in on immigration quota talks between Old Way world Merridon and Highend university planet Omn Leva. When violence broke out on Nestor’s Planet between Old Way factions (pro- vs. anti-CL), she went there in person and sat all of them down in the same room to broker both a cease-fire and a workable compromise about the use of CL. She didn’t have a CL herself, but she couldn’t deny its usefulness. What the Old Way was against—and what she rejected, too—was a society where the CL was the sum total of human contact. The reigning joke was that Angharad spent so little time on Kathayagara, they hadn’t even bothered to put her name on the door.

I found it fitting, then, that the numbers of those who counted themselves followers of the Old Way were on an accelerating upswing over the year and change I tried to pick up the pieces of the Kyritan and failed. Before I went off on my own, I took the ikons of Angharad I had in my house, walked three kilometers, and threw them into the Ulanjara River. There was, thankfully, no law on the books against sacrilege on my homeworld, so they just fined me for littering.

I was brutally sober the morning I was to meet Angharad, but it wasn’t like I had made all that valiant an attempt to empty all those bottles. That bottle I’d opened had been something that passed for a local whiskey, and I’d barely drained a single glass of that varnish before calling it quits. Besides, I’d noticed that most of my attempts to get rolling drunk revolved mostly around whether or not there was an audience, as a way for people to further depress their expectations of me and let their guard down.

Angharad’s full-blown town meeting was scheduled for the day after my private soirée with her. 1400 local time was something like 1100 standard solar. A thirty-hour day wasn’t too bad; I’d been in places with a thirty-five hour day, which was about at the outer limit of what I could handle personally. Not because of biology, although that did figure in, but one’s own expectations and attention span. It hadn’t always been like that: in the years while I was in hiding, shortly before I came back out as a cultivated degenerate, I’d build up the discipline to last through fifty-hour days and up if it came to it. I just hadn’t needed to yet. It would come in handy someday, though . . . or so I told myself.

I came out of the hotel elevator and almost walked right into Enid. She had been curled up in a chair not far from the elevator doors, and she bounded to her feet like a dog being offered to go for a walk.

“What’re you doing here?” I didn’t care if I sounded petulant; not that it deflated any of her enthusiasm.

“I came back after I said my goodbyes. You weren’t taking any calls, so I waited . . . and I figured you’d come downstairs for breakfast or something.”

“I am. I’m eating alone.”

“You had lunch with me yesterday. You liked it. Why can’t we have breakfast together?”

I stopped at the doorway to the buffet lounge and faced her full-on. “Did you really say goodbye to the rest of the circus crew last night? Or did you just ditch out on them and sleep on a rooftop somewhere?”

She unrolled a sheet of MemoCel from her pocket—the same one she’d left for her stablemate, I guessed—and snapped it flat right in front of my nose. Her voice (from behind the MemoCel’s POV, I suppose) recited one choked goodbye after another as various faces—some painted, some masked, some bare—drifted back and forth, in and out of focus. I recognized Agoro and the frizz-haired woman from the other day, standing to one side and dipping in and out of the displayed field of vision as everything else moved around.

Once she saw I was as satisfied as I could have been, Enid rolled the sheet shut and stuck it in a tubular pocket that ran the length of her left thigh.

“We can have breakfast,” I said, and immediately felt myself sink that much more as she perked up, “but after that I’ve got business to deal with. Alone.”

“Business? I thought you were here to goof off.”

“I got roped into some business. Evidently I wasn’t goofing off efficiently enough.”

The buffet was a rip-off. Scrambled runny eggs, overcooked sausage—I eventually gave up on everything except for my oatmeal, which reminded me of quick-setting duracrete. So much for the merits of Old Way style hand-cooking, at least here. Enid plowed through not one but two platefuls of the worst they had to offer; she ate like she’d lose a bet if she didn’t finish everything.

“Where’re you from originally?” I asked despite myself.

“Cordelia. Do you know it?”

“I know that it’s Old Way, but not much more than that.”

“It barely counts as Old Way anymore. Things were starting to fall apart around the time I was born. They allowed CLs, but I never liked having one even when I was a kid, so my parents and I moved around a bit until we found ourselves in a neighborhood that was still pretty Old Way. I got into dance and gymnastics really young.”

“You said you were emancipated.”

“Long story.”

Oh, I thought. Mention that and she clams right up. That narrowed it down: her parents had either died or ditched her, and she’d emancipated herself after being under the troupe’s patronage for a bit—long enough for her to prove she could manage on her own if she had to. I choked off that train of thought before it led me to say something that would touch too many of her nerves at once.

Enid reached into a pocket on her right thigh and brought out five of the gold coins that were among the largest minted denominations on Cytheria. I looked at them stacked on the table between us, picked one up, and let it just sit there in my hand. It was heavy enough to leave dents in the veneer if I put it back down.

“Where’d you get all this?” I said. “Severance pay?”

She nodded “Back wages they owed me. They wanted to make sure I had it before I left.”

“You could live pretty decently for . . . a year or so here, with that much. Cytheria’s cheap, at least for now.” I put the coin back on the pile with the heavy clack of platinum hitting platinum. “Why not just stick around here for a bit? Chase the neighborhood kids around some more, get into some ball games. Do some of your stunts for the evening tourist crowds. That kind of thing.”

“I’ve been doing stuff like that anyway, Henré.” She took the pile of coins and started trading them slowly from hand to hand. “I want something else now. I want something that isn’t just . . . me pulling these little routines for audiences. The whole time I was with the Sky Theater, I kept thinking: I don’t just want to be one of all these other people. I want . . . me and someone else.”

The way she was stumbling around with her words, I needed to say something that blunt to put her back on track. She doesn’t know what she wants, I told myself; she just knows that she want something. That’s what it is to be a kid, still.

“I think I’m a little old for you,” I pointed out.

To my surprise, she didn’t get riled—not much, anyway. She let out a laugh, like what I’d said was a challenge she was more than ready to meet. “I wasn’t thinking about it that way!”

“Fine! So what way were you thinking about it?”

“Well, I thought—me, and someone else I could call a . . . a creative collaborator, I guess. Or I could be someone’s bodyguard, even. I’m a brown belt, remember?” She was looking right at me.

“A bodyguard?” I slapped my fingers to my chest. “You don’t think I know how to defend myself?”

She just smiled and pointed her bright little eyes at me with that fierce look that came so easily to her. Man, I thought, if only you really knew what I could do with all the technology I’ve designed and concealed on my person and elsewhere. Too bad I can’t show it off casually without getting arrested a dozen times over. For emergency use only, indeed.

I stood up and started fishing for my wallet. It wasn’t like I couldn’t use my credit on Cytheria, but the majority of Old Way worlds (and their black markets, and their illegal labor) used and respected cash in some form, and whenever possible I preferred to pay cash and tip with it, too. The art of crossing palms with physical silver (or greasing them) had never quite died out, thanks to its immediate and gratifying psychological impact . . . or its political expediency.

The invitation was folded in on top of my wallet; I’d shoved it into my pocket on the way out of the hotel room, with the rationalization that something like that was safest on my person and nowhere else. I had the wallet in one hand and the letter in the other when I realized Enid had gotten up from her chair and circled around behind me.

The next thing I knew she was on my back, with one arm over my eyes and her legs encircling my chest hard enough to pop out my spareribs. I now had first-hand evidence her strength wasn’t in that protomic bodysuit of hers. All natural muscle at work. Good.

I let her get away with it. She was laughing the whole time we tottered and turned in place. Besides, if even she thought I was that much more helpless, it might well pay off later on.

Then I felt the RSVP pulled out of my hand (I’d been preparing to let go of it in some vain attempt to pry her off me anyway) and her laughter stopped. A second later, her arm withdrew and I felt her slither off my back.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I told the waitress, who looked ready to run off to the fire-control point and douse Enid with the extinguisher as a disciplinary measure. “She’s my niece. She’s just being cute.”

She finally managed to laugh it off and leave us. I was about to turn to Enid and read her the riot act for that bit of horseplay when I saw she had picked up the note and was reading it. I’d only known her for a total of a day and a half, but that was enough for me to tell the stricken look she was wearing was a pretty rare thing. I guess I should have left out the niece bit, I thought.

“You’re seeing her?” she said, pressing the note back into my hand.

I shrugged, then nodded, then shrugged and nodded at the same time.

Enid looked at the floor and made the tiniest little sweep of the space in front of her with one foot.

I’d only had my daughter for a few years, but that was enough time for me to get to know all the things she did when she wanted something. The way she would look down, the way she would point one toe just so . . . these were things all kids did, although as they got older they learned how to hold back more and more of it.

And when you were Old Way, you learned at some point in your life that all the worlds that weren’t Old Way didn’t know these things, because their idea of what constituted a “kid” was anyone under the biological age of fifty or so—and they rarely, if ever, had any kids themselves. It was easier to import them wholesale, as adults.

“Can I go with you?” she said. Her voice was cracking and there was a flush rising on her face that, again, wasn’t something I’d seen her even come close to. Not even when her co-workers from the circus had come for her; not even when she’d been pleading with them in front of me. CanIgowithyou? was how the words came out.

This wasn’t the same kind of need as her wanting to follow me around. This was coming from someplace totally different—someplace rooted even deeper, it seemed. And I knew I was responding to it.

“You want to see her? Why?” I kept my voice down.

“There’s something I gotta ask her. Just one question. Five minutes, not even. I mean, I knew she was going to be in town doing that town hall meeting, but the people for those things are all selected way in advance, and . . . ” She had, thank goodness, kept her voice down during all that (not that she sounded like she could have raised it above a shaky whisper anyway). “Can we at least try?”

“I don’t know if they’ll let us do that, Enid. It says me, not me plus one.”

“Can we at least try?”

Without thinking about what I was doing—something I’d been growing accustomed to, unfortunately—I put my hands on her shoulders. “They gave me an hour. Maybe they’ll be willing to give me forty-five minutes and you fifteen.”

She put her arms around me again, this time from the front. I stood there and let everyone stare at us for a few seconds, then retrieved my wallet from the floor and put a generous tip on the table.

The Cytherian Summit Lodge is somewhere between a hotel and a conference center, but it’s reserved specifically for VIPs who come planetside and are received by the Cytherian Assembly as guests of the state. Angharad fit smack into that category, so I wasn’t surprised she would be staying at this building that looked from the outside for all the world like a classy countryside resort. The lobe of it that had been set aside for us was barely two stories tall, but surrounded by gardens and with a fenceline far enough around the property that it felt more like they were trying to keep something in than keep the rest of us out.

People were loitering for blocks in every direction around the lodge. I made most of them for journalists—backs to walls, squinting, smoking, playing with the cortical-capture rigs around their necks. What with CL stuff all but prohibited planetside, they had to use obvious external models to get any real work done, and they all looked fed up at having to drop down that far on the evolutionary ladder. They were mixed in with all the rest of the crowd, the pilgrims and the faithful—carrying ikons of Her Grace, seated on cushions (a couple of them were even sitting on top of a parked groundcar), clasping loops of beads wrapped around little totems of the greater/lesser interlinked circles of the Old Way. My pace slowed as I walked past them, as the sight of all this brought up a burst of nostalgia I didn’t know what to do with. You don’t go right back to believing just because you’re surrounded by the right kind of people on the outside again, I told myself. Something inside has to be alive and burning, too.

I realized with a dull little buzz that I might end up with my name in the news again just for being here, and quickened my steps. Enid still outpaced me all the way up to the lodge’s outer gate.

Two of Angharad’s retinue were waiting at the gate to walk me up the gravel path. The front doors, lacquered red and black, slid back, and cold air from inside puffed out at me. I was tempted to crack a joke, something like I guess even Angharad doesn’t say no to air conditioning, but kept it in. Nobody needed to know just how irreligious or iconoclastic I’d become in the last few years; that would all come out on its own.

I’d brought the letter Angharad had sent me, just in case I needed it—Old Way living, old-school methods—but they settled for some plain old biometrics and a passive CL identity-tag check instead. Even when “off” the CL still responded to near-field requests from those with authority, and in most jurisdictions it was mandatory for a CL to generate a reply to Who are you?

Angharad’s room had one wall open to face one of the inner gardens, where a three-level fountain burbled and attracted the occasional bird. The room itself was minimal—matted floors, small round cushions for guests, and a large square one (more like a platform) on which Her Grace herself sat at the far end of the room.

Millennia of civilization have not managed to make it any less startling to see someone in person for the first time after you’ve spent half a lifetime only looking at pictures or replaying CL dumps. She had more than a few biological years on me, and true to her Old Way heritage she wore with pride the slight lines in her face and the tinges of gray in her hair. She wore the same midnight blue wimple and robes she’d been clad in on the posters, with what I knew to be waist-length black hair wound tight in a multi-coiled coiffure. Two ropes of that coiffure peeked out from either side of the wimple, framing her face all the more closely, accentuating her purple-grey eyes and her smile—which in every picture I’d seen always looked like she was welcoming a friend.

“Mister Sim!” (And seeing her is nothing compared to the jolt you get when you hear her actually saying your name.) “Please, sit. If there is anything you would like, the Lodge offers a full range of refreshments.”

“I’m fine, thank you.” I sounded a lot creakier and less confident than I thought I would. She sounded like just saying hello to someone in that contralto of hers was more fun than anything else you could ask her to do. For some reason it was hard for me to get into a proper crosslegged seating position in front of her, and I felt doubly weird towering over her even when sitting down. She was barely taller than Enid herself, maybe a hundred sixty centimeters to my full two meters and change.

“I, uh . . . ” (Cosm take it all, what do you say to the living avatar of the belief system you were reared in and then left behind? “Heard you missed me”?) “This was all kind of out of the blue, you know, so I’m a little . . . Look, how did you find me?”

“This isn’t a very large town. One of my personal assistants overheard your name being mentioned in what appeared to be an argument in the open-air section of a hotel’s restaurant. She identified you and came to me.”

The woman in the blue robes. Well, serves me right for staring back, I guess. And it wasn’t as if someone looking for me under my real name wouldn’t eventually find me. I had never bothered to hide: anyone who came looking for me usually came away massively disappointed anyway.

“I had been meaning to speak with you after the incident with your family,” she went on, tamping down the buoyancy in her voice a bit. “Unfortunately, I was unable to make contact with you, and then you withdrew from public life for quite some time.”

People tend to do things like that after their family and best friend die, I thought. Along with tons of other folks whose big mistake that day was simply being together in the same ship.

“Wait, you were looking for me back then, too?” I said.

“I was, but I did a very poor job of it.” She sounded even more reserved now, eyes down a little further. “At the time, I paid, I admit, little attention to such things as starship disasters. But when word reached me about the restitution campaign you attempted, I attempted to contact you. By then, however, you had removed yourself from the public eye. So, again, I apologize.”

“Well—” I don’t remember what I originally had in mind to say after that, because the laugh that came out of me instead swept it clean away. “From the sound of it, if anyone should apologize, it’s me. I’m the one that squirreled himself away for so long.” I straightened my back a bit more.

“It can only be presumed that you had your reasons, Mister Sim.”

Fine, I thought, because I wasn’t about to tell even (and especially) her what I’ve really been doing all this time.

“Henré is fine. Look—” I shifted around again on the cushion—my damn legs were already starting to fall asleep on me in that pose—and tried, not very successfully, to sound petulant. “—why did you come looking for me? I mean, not just to offer condolences, from the sound of it.” I didn’t want to come out and say What do you want from me?, but I was getting mighty close.

“I had heard about your self-instigated campaign to apologize to the families and relatives of all the others who had lost their lives on the Kyritan,” she said, and suddenly the dull buzzing in my legs was nothing compared to the hard, loud buzzing in my head. “My understanding is that you took a fair amount of your own time and money to approach many of them individually and apologize to them for what you perceived as your failure. But this was interrupted when the manufacturers and managers of the Kyritan took legal action against you for what they believed to be a mischaracterization of the quality of their products—”

“Yes. Exoluft thought I was using the whole thing as a platform to badmouth them.” Talking only made the head-buzzing worse, but I went on anyway. “I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but that’s how they saw it. They made noises about suing me at first, and then they approached me privately with a settlement on the condition I make no more public statements about the incident.” I looked around, let out a little between-the-teeth laugh. “I wonder—you’re a public figure. Does this count as a ‘public statement’?”

Her smile was as serene as mine was forced. “This conversation is entirely private.”

Wings fluttered outside, and something went splash in the fountain. I turned my head too late to see what had caused the commotion, and found myself staring out there into the sunlit greenery for seconds on end. Angharad didn’t even so much as clear her throat to get my attention. Maybe she trusted I’d snap out it before too long.

“What did you want from me?” I finally asked.

“I wanted to know why you wanted to apologize for something that was manifestly not your fault. You were, after all, cleared of any wrongdoing in two separate investigations.”

She’s done her homework and the extra-credit assignment, I thought. With what she already knew, I wondered how she couldn’t have put the rest together herself.

Or maybe she had and she was just waiting for me to come out and say it.

I shook my head. “They cleared me of wrongdoing. That doesn’t mean I felt I was blameless.”

“What was it you felt you had done wrong?”

“There had to be something, right? Look, I know my own work, or at least that’s what I told myself. And if I don’t know my own work, then that’s bad news. If anything was wrong, I thought I’d be the only one to discover it. Things like this don’t just happen. I went back over every design, every materials program, and I just kept coming up empty-handed. They did their own two investigations and finally just shrugged and said ‘Sabotage, maybe.’ Didn’t say whether it was sabotage by some third party or some negligence on my part that would have looked like sabotage to an outsider. So I went back and kept bugging them to keep looking, because it sounded like they wanted to close the file without actually closing it. They told me this was their job, not mine. They didn’t bother looking a third time. Soon they started paying out settlements to the families involved, me included. And I said, ‘This isn’t going to be enough. People want answers.’ If Exoluft wasn’t going to give answers, I would. So I went and started looking up the bereaved on my own, seeing if they would even want to talk to me. And you know what? Some did. They let me into their houses; they let me sit in their kitchens and on their porches. I showed them pictures of my wife and daughter and they showed me the ones they’d lost . . .

“The first time you cry that the way I did when I lost my girls, you feel like you’ve got some disease, like there’s something so wrong with you that you’re ashamed to be in so much pain . . . and then you see someone else like that, letting it all out just as shamelessly, and you realize no, it’s not a sickness. Even when I got doors slammed in my face it still felt better, because I was doing something—for me, for all of us.”

I liked the way she looked when she was listening. Beatific was the word that came to mind, after some scrounging. I took in some extra breath and headed for the finish.

“So. My former employer got wind of what was going on, and he dumped a few more metric tons of cash into my bank account and told me to go stick my head in the sand somewhere and stop making us all look bad.” I slapped my knees. “And, well, here we are.”

It didn’t hit me until after I’d finished speaking that the buzz—the sick, free-floating feeling in my head—had long dissipated by the time I mentioned kitchens and porches. Now there was just the weight of wasted years.

“You were under no obligation to do any of those things,” she said. “If anything, you were being obliged to do the exact opposite.”

“Yeah, and after a while, I did. Do the exact opposite, that is.”

“But still . . . ” She eased herself off her cushion and took a few steps to the blank wall opposite the garden view. There wasn’t anything there—not a picture, not even an especially interesting design—but she turned herself partway towards that wall as she spoke. “We talk all the time of what is moral or right, but you had the courage to put your feelings of what is right into action, even at great personal risk. And I imagine, from what you have said, that you do not consider what you did an act of ‘courage’. It needed to be done, from your point of view.”

She turned her face towards me. She was expecting an answer, and I wasn’t sure I had one that would have satisfied her.

“You got that right,” I said.” It was my turn to sound humbled. She, on the other hand, now sounded a little more breathless and pleading.

“Henré—all of us, in some way, have power over others. I tell few people that when I was first coronated for this position many years ago I could have cared less about it. It was simply something that was destined to happen to me whether or not I had any say in the matter.” She knelt down next to me, and I felt myself flinch a little. “We who hold the title of Supreme Kathaya are chosen for it because we show at an early age the signs of being ascendant to the qualities that demand it. If others in the Achitraka, including my predecessor, had not seen then what I could be capable of they would not have chosen me. But all the same being chosen sped my growth into the role.

“You were a talented designer, and you were surrounded with people who were willing to help make those designs reality. Your community of peers, your family, your creations themselves . . . You were prepared to surrender all of that for something you felt was more right than all of it put together. I have not seen this in even five other men in my lifetime. But I ask you this: would you be willing, somehow, to take back up all that you surrendered? Is the only reason you cannot continue your former work because you believe you are still at fault for what happened, even if you do not quite know how? Do you feel you have no right to create anymore?”

I didn’t just want to throw an answer back at her. I deserved to take it as seriously as she did.

“ . . . I can’t come up with an answer to that while just sitting here. I—” I shook my head.

It’s always a shame when you find yourself in front of someone who deserves the truth, but you can’t give it to them. I hadn’t told anyone the truth about why I’d hid myself away—why would I start even with her?

“Please. No answer now is required from you. All that I ask is that you take these words with you when you go.” She put her hand out—palm down, fingers curved up and spread out—in the gesture that every follower of the Old Way, me included, knew: Go in peace.

I returned the gesture with my opposing hand.

“I haven’t done that in forever,” I said, trying to stand. My knees weren’t working properly, and it had little to do with being in one sitting position for too long. But once I was on my feet I was better able to look her in the eye and say the things I’d been holding back the whole time.

“You know,” I said, “after the incident, I had to go through all my wife’s stuff. She had an ikon of you, same as my little girl. I took them, and I took the one I had in my room too, and—”

“You got rid of them.”

I was smiling when she said that—bashful, chagrined, a hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile.

“Barely a day goes by,” she said, “without me receiving a letter, or a visit, or some other missive from someone who feels they have lost faith. They direct it at me, but it is always and forever themselves they have lost faith in. Their faith never came from me to begin with, but I have found sometimes I can help them find it again. If they wish it, that is.”

“I’m just—well, I’m glad you didn’t take that too personally.”

She put her fingertips over her mouth and laughed. “A picture of me is not me, Henré. You still agreed to see me. That much shows respect. And besides, if you turn away from me only to find something greater, how am I to find that a loss?”

She reached for the door, but before she slid it back she added:

“You were a man of great strength once. Nothing is stopping you from becoming one again. I urge you not to shirk your chances to reclaim yourself and do what you feel is right.”

I am doing what I feel is right, I thought. And yet as I stepped back out into the corridor—she followed along behind me—I couldn’t shake the feeling she’d been working her way up to asking me something else, and had stopped just short of doing so.

“Listen, uh . . . ” I turned back to her and saw she was listening with the same open, receptive eyes as she had been back in the room. “I have a favor. I know we had an hour booked—”

“Yes, we still have time. Did you want to speak of something else?”

“It’s . . . actually more complicated than that. There’s a girl who came with me—she’s waiting outside—and when she found out I’d been invited here she begged me to come along and ask for five minutes of your time. I’m willing to give up some of my time; I just didn’t know if you were willing to trade like that.”

“A girl? How old?”

“Fourteen, fifteen. She was with the troupe that was in town the day before you showed up.”

“The Sky Theater! Yes, I’ve heard of them.” She drew herself up a little straighter—I wondered how that was possible, since she always stood ramrod-firm and with her chin up—and nodded. “Since you have vouched for her, I would prefer you remain present during her audience.”

“Sure, of course.” What was I going to do: say no? Well, in theory, there was nothing stopping me from doing that—but now I knew firsthand it was nigh-impossible to stand in the same room with her and not feel obliged to do what she said, lapsed Old Way or not.

They brought me back out to the front door, where I saw Enid being held at the main gate. No mistaking her at any distance. She was bounding up and down over the heads of the guards and waving at me; I half expected her to climb right over them.

“Fifteen minutes tops,” I told her. She had a giddy bounce in her step, but as we were walked back into the conference room her bounciness leveled off.

The second the door slid shut, Enid bounded—no, lunged—right at Angharad like a dog pouncing for the throat.

The girl had her right arm drawn back and her right fist balled up good and tight, and the fact that she was throwing a punch at the other woman was still being processed by my brain long after my own body had leapt into action.

I couldn’t turn on all the protomic goodies I had on my person, which for the time being were safely disguised as the clothes I was wearing. Definitely not here, where whatever else happened I was likely to come under enough scrutiny to blow every cover I had. But I could at least throw myself forward, cock one arm around her punching arm, and give one good hard yank that flipped her around and brought her to the mats.

She didn’t just lie there. She tried to kick everything she could reach with her feet, bite anything within range of her mouth. I got her face against the floor and knelt in just the right place to warn her that I meant plenty of business.

“You sit down and calm down,” I said, “or I swear to whatever you wanna put on a pedestal that I will break your cute little neck.”

Brown belt be damned, I thought.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three