[CH IV]

I woke up slowly in the morning, dragging myself back into unwilling consciousness. Automatically, I slid my hand out across the unfamiliar bed to reach out for—for nothing. There was nothing in the other side of the bed but cool sheets and emptiness. That woke me up faster, and I sat up, wincing and rubbing at the side of my face.

I hadn't slept in the same bed with anyone for almost three weeks. I didn't know why I had expected someone to be there. Christ, I really needed to get a grip on myself. Right now there wasn't time for any of this kind of stupid post-relationship moping. I had shit to get done, here. I could be depressed about Keyd when my planet was safe.

I rubbed at my face a little bit more, trying to tamp down that godawful puffy-swollen feeling in my eyelids, and swung my legs out of the side of the bed. The room was dark and murky, but most of the globe-lights on the houses outside the window were turned up again, which seemed to mean it was daytime again. Since otherwise it was still just as dark and grey-blue and miserable outside as it had been yesterday. Except that it wasn't raining anymore.

Ociir had showed me how to turn the globes on and off the night before, which was pretty easy. All I had to do was touch them with intent, and the bach energy in me, that I was just naturally absorbing by being here around all these guys, did the rest. There was one in the middle of the ceiling, one by the door and two outside the window, so I had to open it to get to them. It was freezing outside, the rain replaced by a biting, ice-cold wind that sliced down to my bones when I pushed the windows open.

I shut them again instantly. Fuck those lights. I didn't really need them on anyway. The point of them was to pretend it was actually light outside, and I already knew it wasn't. I turned on the one on the ceiling and the one by the door instead, and then crawling back into the bed, shivering. This was a great start to my attempted self-confident plan to talk the agistar down from destroying Earth—hiding in bed.

Several minutes—or an hour maybe, who even knew—later, there was a knock on the door. Startled, I wriggled my way back out of the bed and stood up. I was pretty much going to assume this was Ociir, since everyone else in this house had already gotten what they wanted out of me—news about Rysa. They didn't have any other reasons to bother me.

I'd slept in my clothes, so I was already dressed. I probably looked like a mess, but I hardly cared. I opened the door, and Ociir was standing out in the hallway, with a woman just slightly taller than he was at his side. My first guess was that this was the woman he was engaged to, and that was confirmed when right after saying 'good morning' to me, he introduced her to me as Ishan, his auloun.

"Hi, uh, nice to meet you," I said to the woman, who had a small, rounded face and big eyes with bigger eyelashes. She looked a little delicate and girly, but she certainly didn't act that way. As a greeting, she stacked her fists on top of each other like she was about to go pound a mortar with a pestle, and dipped her head down in a brisk little bow.

"Good to meet you, Alan," she said, her big eyes staring unblinking into mine, with a sort of inquisitive friendliness. Her irises were an odd pale brown-grey color, and her blond hair was a little bit darker than usual, with much more gold in it than white. "I've heard much about you."

Ociir was apparently a serious chatterbox. Why exactly was he telling his entire social circle about me? I guess this woman was his fiancée, so it sort of made sense, and Eleon was his brother, so…

"Ah," I said. "Uh. I hope that's good."

She nodded once. "It is," she said. She dropped her hands from the stacked up position, and edged back a little, letting Ociir step forward intead. He handed me a stack of folded fabric he'd been holding under his arm. It was all mostly in greys, greens, tans, and off-whites.

"These are some things of Eleon's," Ociir said. "From when he was younger. They're smaller, so I thought they might fit you."

"All right, thanks," I said, and tossed the stack back at the bed. I didn't need them right away—I figured I could still go a day or two in what I was wearing now. I wasn't in a real hurry to wear any of this stuff from this side of the war. "I'm sure it'll all be fine. Thanks."

Ociir and Ishan went downstairs after that, and I followed them out of a lack of anything else to do. Plus I had a question I'd thought of that I wanted to ask Ociir.

"So, uh, Ociir," I said, once we were back down in the living room area. "Is it just your brothers and sisters and you—well, you sort of—that live here together? What about your parents?"

"This is their home," Ociir said. "But our father is currently with the forces. He's a healer. Our mother is—was—a soldier."

Was. Well, that was pretty telling in itself. Past tense didn't meant good stuff. I swallowed a little.

"Does Rysa know?" I asked, and Ociir nodded once.

"It was many years ago, long before Ahieel cursed them. So yes, she knows."

Christ. Well. That was…good, in a way. One less thing I'd have to tell her about her family when I saw her again. If I saw her again. I wanted to say something, to express sympathy or something for his loss, but I couldn't come up with a good way to say it and not sound stupid.

"So, uh, what's going on now?" I said, instead. "I mean, yeah. What's happening?"

Ociir and Ishan glanced at each other. "We're needed back at the temple," Ociir said. "I only wanted to get those things for you, and for Ishan to meet you."

Okay, seriously, why? I really wasn't that cool or anything.

"Uh, sure," I said. Some of my confusion must have gotten across to them, because Ishan and Ociir exchanged a look, and then sort of double-teamed me, hustling me into a really small room right off the entryway. It was practically a closet—it probably was a closet. Ociir touched his hand to a globe on the ceiling and lit it up, while Ishan pulled the door shut after us. The tiny tiny fucking room gave each of us about two square feet of space, like this was our secret club and we were all huddling up to go off on a goddamn adventure or something.

"I'm sorry, Alan," Ociir said, still glancing around nervously like he thought someone else might be in this closet with us. "I should have mentioned this before. But Ishan and I are—" he glanced around yet again, and I noticed Ishan giving him a little bit of a look. "We're separatists."

"Right," I said. "I have no idea what that means." Except that, apparently, it needed to be talked about in a closet.

"It means that we don't believe we should be at war with the oenclar," Ishan said. "That we should stop this, all of this. The wars and the fighting and the hatred. We were once one people—and we should be so again."

I blinked at her, hard. "Shouldn't you be…unificationists or something, then?"

"The only way to unite our races is to get rid of what separated us in the first place," Ociir said. He pressed his hand to his chest, right where his heart-mark would be. "The entities."

This was way too much information for me at this early in the morning. I was only kind of getting the importance of what Ociir was saying.

"Then, you—" I said, trying to fit this all together in my head, "I thought you died if they separated from you. I mean…I've seen it happen." I could only think of Maedajon, and how fucking horrible that had been. There was no way anybody survived that kind of thing.

"Some of us think there might be ways, to separate and live," Ociir said. "This movement isn't new, or small. But it's a dangerous mindset to hold. To many, it's the attitude of a traitor. It's very dangerous to even speak of and, of course, even more so to practice."

"But what you did to Ahieel," Ishan said. "It's something no one has seen before. That his entities have simply stopped. They no longer generate energy or renew themselves. But Ahieel is—physically—fine."

"I don't know what I did," I said. At this point, I hardly remembered. It had been so damn long ago. Or it felt like it, anyway.

"It doesn't matter," Ociir said. "What you did to Ahieel was most likely a single, unique incident. I doubt it could be recreated. The importance of it is just that it seems to be possible. That there might be ways to unbind ourselves with these entities, and survive. It's very—it's very important, Alan."

"And I just wanted to meet you," Ishan said. "I'm sorry if I seemed rude."

"No, you're…fine," I said. I still felt like I had no real idea what was going on, like something really huge was told to me but I just couldn't see it. But then Ociir was opening the closet door and letting us all out again, and he and Ishan both bowed to me and left the house, and I was just left blinking and staring uselessly at the closed front door. Still feeling like I'd totally missed the boat.

#

I felt very awkward in this house once they were gone. I wandered from room to room, not running into any other members of Ociir's family, and kind of glad about that. I wondered where the two sisters had gone—did they have day jobs, or something?—or where Ahieel was. Although when I glanced out the tall windows in that front room, that question was answered pretty quickly. He was out in the garden at that same table, looking sullen and generally unhappy. Was that seriously what he did all day—sat in the garden?

I thought about what Ociir and Ishan had told me. That they were part of some underground movement that wanted to actually get rid of their symbiotic relationship with these energy entities. They'd said the movement wasn't small, or new. I wondered how many people were part of it, how they'd started thinking that the entities were bad. I wondered if anybody on the oenclar side felt the same way. I wondered how wondering about this kind of thing had suddenly become just a given part of my life. Had I really just been a regular college kid a few months ago? I could barely remember what that felt like.

Passing between the sort of living room area and the dining room, I bumped into someone coming the opposite direction. The person let out a little yelp and hopped back, catching himself against the doorframe.

"Oh, Eleon, hey," I said. "Sorry."

Eleon lifted his head and blinked through his bangs at me. "Alan!" he said, and clutched harder at the doorframe. "Hi."

Eleon wore incredibly simple clothes, I noticed, compared to Ociir and his temple get-up and the two girls with their thousands of layers and draping bits of fabric and things. Eleon was just in bluish pants that were about as loose as sweatpants, and a tan shirt that hung to the middle of his thighs and sleeves ending at his elbows. He wasn't wearing shoes or anything else. He had what looked like a piece of rope tied around his left wrist, which was the hand still gripping into the doorframe.

"So, uh, what's up?" I said, at a loss for anything else to say. Everyone else was gone; was he just in the house by himself? Was this was he did all day? If he was thought of as being a kid, did he go to school, or anything? Did they have school here?

Eleon shook his head, blinking fast at me. Christ, but this kid was shy. It was cute in a pretty awkward way.

"You the only one here?" I asked, and Eleon nodded.

"Other than Ahieel," he said.

"You're gonna be here for a while?" I asked, and Eleon nodded.

"You wanna hang out with me? Because I'm both bored and stressed out of my mind?

I didn't add that last part, but Eleon looked like I'd just made his goddamn month. He nodded eagerly and actually let go of his death-grip on the doorframe, pinking a little but looking really pleased. That felt kind of nice.

#

At first Eleon fanboyed me like crazy, sort of followed me around in a awestruck glee, but as we talked more and spent more time together, he calmed down a lot. By the end of that day, he felt more like a friend than anything else. And I really needed a friend. I didn't have anything else.

He showed me around the whole house, which had two stories and, oddly, an attic. He showed me how things in the bathroom worked (like the shower, which was a little weird) and one of the most interesting things in the entire house, which was the clock. This whole race wasn't really big on technology or things with running mechanisms in them, so they didn't have any kind of time-telling device that ran on its own. And without any natural light source, they couldn't have sundials. So the clock, which was in the main living area of the house, ran on water. It looked like a long ruler mounted on the wall, symbols (that I assumed were numbers) marked evenly down it. A complicated rig of weights and paced drips of water behind it made a wooden marker slowly move down the side of the clock all through the day. And apparently, when it the marker hit the bottom, every twelve hours, the weights and water triggered a spring that knocked the marker back into place at the top. And it started again.

Eleon didn't seem as impressed by the clock as I was, but then again he saw it every day. To me, that clock was a serious reminder of how different this entire race was. Them, and the oenclar. These were incredibly different people from any culture I knew—I mean, I'd never seen an analogue clock that wasn't round. Everything here worked so far from the usual. How had I ever though I could have a relationship with a person who came from such an opposite background? Even if Keyd hadn't had this royal status, could we really have ever made it? We were so different, in almost every way.

I got into something of a depressed funk after that, and Eleon seemed to sense it and left me alone for a while. I glowered around in Ociir's room for several hours, occasionally taking out the little book Rysa had given me so I could glare at it, and clenching my hand around Keyd's necklace in my pocket. And nobody bothered me for a good long while, not until Eleon hesitantly knocked on the door and asked if I wanted to come down for dinner.

Unfortunately, I was starving, so I did. Downstairs there was a whole damn family gathering going on, that Ociir and Ishan had come back around for themselves. And even Ahieel had dragged his sorry ass in out from the garden. I was apparently fully welcome to be here, since nobody seemed surprised when Leon and I came down the stairs. Eleon managed to get himself seated next to me—it may have been because of his slight hero-worship complex, but I honestly didn't mind him there. It was better than being next to Ahieel.

Apparently Ieta was the one who mostly cooked for the family, and she'd done so now. I couldn't recognize anything on the table, even if it all bordered on being familiar. There were vegetables, and there was a sort of meat, and there was bread, all of it close to being something normal but just hitting off the mark. And then there was milk. Normal milk. Tasting completely regular, if maybe a little bit richer and fattier. I guess they had cows, somewhere, I had no idea where the hell that kind of thing might be going on. I knew so little about this world.

The Soodun family dinner was much more well behaved than my family dinners. There wasn't any yelling or throwing bread rolls or kicking each other or shrieking for donations to the swear-jar. Then again, they were all adults, except sort of for Eleon. In fact, they all hardly talked at all. I didn't know if that was just how this family was, or my presence was upsetting things, or if they'd all had a big fight I didn't know about or what. But most of the words exchanged had to do with passing things around the table.

Ahieel sat stoically in his chair and ate slowly and methodically, like he really didn't care what he was doing and was getting no enjoyment from it. Ohean was on one side of him, and she kept glancing worriedly at him and putting more things on his plate. Ieta kept getting up and bustling around and going back into the kitchen and hardly looked like she was getting much of her own eating down. She also kept chastising Eleon for doing things wrong—eating too fast, too much, too sloppily, too noisily. He took each criticism quietly, sometimes glancing at Ohean or Ociir for help, both of whom were too involved in other people to really pay him much attention.

Ociir was pretty wrapped up in looking at Ishan, and she was doing the same thing right back. Those stupid, sappy, squishy couple looks that seriously drove home on how alone I was here. How alone I was in general. I'd never been a needy person and I'd always kind of liked that about myself, but watching Ociir and Ishan fawn over each other through looks alone hurt. It hurt because I'd almost had that. I'd had someone who really seriously cared about me, who I cared about just as much, and we'd both destroyed it.

I'd already been missing Keyd like a constant knife being shoved between my ribs right to my heart. Since leaving him weeks ago, I'd been feeling it like this. But a lot of the time I could ignore it, push it away to the back of my thoughts to where it got overridden by more immediate issues. But sometimes, like right now, it was so bad I forgot why I was even furious at him, why I was here, why I was doing this. All I could remember was his awkward sincerity and fierce devotion and even the little moments of startling affection. And how much I wanted that back.

After dinner, Eleon followed me back upstairs to the room I was borrowing from Ociir. I didn't even mind anymore—I had told him he could talk to me any time, and apparently he was translating that as all the time. But it was okay. I didn't really like being by myself around here. It made me feel better that Eleon actually liked having me around.

The globe lights outside the window were still out, so I went over to go turn them up, since it was just a little too dim in the room without them. When I turned back around, I saw that Eleon had picked up the little leather book Rysa had given me, and that I'd been hopelessly toting around with me ever since. He was looking at the cover, tracing his fingers over the symbols emblazoned across the front.

"Can you read that?" I asked, almost hopeful. Rysa must have given it to me for a reason, after all. She wanted me to read it—impossible until, maybe, now.

"I—" Eleon glanced up, a slight frown on his face. "This is the oenclar alphabet. Ours is similar, but there's—a lot of differences, too. I—someone else, not me, might be able to read it."

"Why not you?"

"I don't know what all the differences are," Eleon admitted. "I just know there are some. Even if I could read it, I wouldn't know what it was saying. We have different languages, too."

"I figured that much out," I said. "But what about frequency—that pretty much translates everything, right?"

"Frequency can't translate our own words to ourselves," Eleon said. "Only what others are saying. It just doesn't work like that. I do know a few Isji words, but only because Ociir knows them."

"Oh," I said. "That's…kind of weird."

Eleon shrugged a little, looking apologetic. I shut my eyes and rubbed hard at the sides of my face. "You're sure you couldn't read it?" I asked.

Eleon turned the book over and over between his hands, nervously sliding his fingers along the spine. "I think someone else could do it better."

I sighed a little. "I just—look, someone gave it to me, and I feel like there was a reason. But I can't read it and even if I could I don't speak the language—you're the only one in this world I trust enough to ask."

Eleon went bright pink and clutched the book closer to himself. But he still said, "I don't think I can."

I sighed. "Fine, okay." I held my hand out, and Eleon cautiously put the book back in it. "Just thought I'd ask."

"Ohean," Eleon said, and I blinked at him. "Ohean would be able to. You should ask her."

"Really," I said. I didn't want to bail out on Eleon here, but if there was a chance I could get over the mystery of this stupid fucking book, I really wanted to get it done. "Okay, then—I think I'm going to do that now. D'you mind?"

Eleon shook his head no. I waited another few moments for him to object, or something, and then shrugged and left the room in search of Ohean.

I found her a few minutes later, sitting out in the garden, bent over a book of her own. Because the light never changed around here, it didn't matter than it was technically nighttime now—the garden was lit up like always by globes hanging off the eves of the house. Ohean's wispy blond hair was piled high on her head as usual, whitish strands of it floating around her face in the breeze. Ahieel wasn't out here right now—maybe she'd chased him and his morose attitude away.

"Ohean, hey," I said, and she glanced up distractedly. When she saw it was me, she placed a ribbon between the pages of her book to keep her place and set it aside.

"Hello, Alan," she said.

"Sorry to interrupt you," I said, and she waved her hand in an 'it's no bother' kind of gesture. I sat down next to her on the garden bench, resting the little brown-leather book across my knees, keeping one hand on it. "I have a pretty strange favor to ask you."

#

Ohean had absolutely no problem about agreeing to read me the book—in fact, she was almost overly excited about it. Apparently, ever since her sister had turned up being a different alignment than the rest of the family, Ohean had formed an intense private fascination with the differences and history of the two races. So she had been the perfect person to ask about reading a book that detailed things about the oenclar royal family. Which was probably why Eleon had directed me to her in the first place.

She handled the book very carefully, as though it was some sort of sacred relic, turning each page very gently. Much nicer than I had ever treated the thing, like when I'd thrown it across a room. She got tripped up once in a while and generally read it very slowly, but she was reading it. And I was hearing it translated through frequency, even if she really didn't have any idea what she was saying.

Basically, it was the record book of some guy named Serhylas, apparently a part of the ghereen when Maedajon's father had been the agistar. That was confusing enough to keep track of, but it did tell me the book had been written a while ago. Which made it a little confusing as to why it was even relevant to anything at all, why Rysa had it, or why she'd given it to me. I'd thought that she'd given me this book and it would be about Keyd, but now I wasn't so sure.

This guy kept a lot of long, boring records of things. The first several pages were extremely dry and endless accounts of things like council agendas and economics and politics of things that I could barely understand, let alone relate to. There was no mention of any sort of war. So this had to be even before that had started. I actually didn't know how long ago the war had started, but I assumed it was a fairly long time.

We tried skipping ahead several pages and skimming a little, where Ohean would just poke her finger at a random sentence on the page and start there.

Until Ohean hit a jackpot sentence.

"Maedajon had named me to act as his son's ykaret," she read, and I jolted to attention. "An unsurprising request, but even so the timing is rather early. The boy has barely reached his fourth year, and his personality is still ill-suited for long hours of studying and sitting still for lessons. Additionally—"

"Oh, shit," I said, accidentally interrupting her. My heart seemed to beat a little faster. "This is—don't skim this part."

"Maedajon," Ohean said. She'd obviously understood that word, since it was a name. "Not the same as the oenclar agistar?"

"Yeah," I said, after a pause. I remembered that Eleon had called Keyd the artaln during our chat the other day. Maybe the clarbach didn't yet know about the shift in power in the enemy camp. And if they didn't, I wasn't going to tell them.

"This book is about him?" Ohean said. She put two fingers in between the pages and turned back to the first page, as if looking for a byline. "You didn't tell me that."

"No," I said. "It's about his son. Or part of it should be. I think. I'm not sure anymore."

"His son," Ohean said, looking at me a little harder.

"Yeah," I said, not sure what was up with that look. Had Ociir told her about Keyd and me too? He'd told Eleon—I still wasn't sure why—but had he told other people? What was even the point of that?"

But Ohean didn't say anything else. Instead, she bent back over the book, sliding the tip of her finger along under the printed words as she started to read aloud again.

"Additionally, the boy has very little similarity to his father," she read out. "So little that it becomes difficult to see how he could have been borne from the same blood. At our first meeting Keydestas presented himself to me as a highly emotional child, overly delicate in countenance and with little tolerance for physical discomfort. Nothing of this child speaks of his blood or heritage; although reluctant to point to a specific source of his weaknesses, it was more than likely the influence of—"

Ohean stopped here, suddenly, letting out a little breath.

"What?" I said, edging closer to her before I realized I was doing it. Listening to this was like being read a strangely compelling story, one I had to keep frequently reminding myself was actually real. The man who had written this had written it about Keyd.

"The rest of the page is ripped out," Ohean said, lifting the book towards me so I could see. The bottom third of the page had been ripped very purposefully across, not in a way that looked like careless handling had done. Ohean turned the shortened page over, frowning.

"Looks like more pages have been taken out," she said, tracing her finger along the little juts of torn paper along the inside of the book's spine.

"Dammit," I said. "Dammit! What the fuck? I don't get this!"

"What?" Ohean said, lifting an eyebrow at me and my less than mature explosion.

"I don't know—it seemed like maybe it was the reason I was given this book in the first place," I said, letting myself fall backwards onto the bed. I rubbed the heels of my hands against my eyes and then dropped my arms over my face. "About Keyd."

"There is more of the book, you know," Ohean said, her other eyebrow joining the first up by her hairline. "Just these pages are missing. I can read more."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah. Uh. That'd be good."

But the journal went back to boring reports and lists for several pages after that. I phased out a little bit, thinking hard. So far, the one paragraph about Keyd had described someone who sounded entirely unlike Keyd. Highly emotional and 'delicate in countenance'? I wasn't really surprised, I guess—he'd been a little kid, he hadn't had the time to start packing away and hiding his emotions and developing his complexes yet.

But I hoped this wasn't why Rysa had given me the book. If she wanted me to see that Keyd had once upon a time had emotions; I already knew he had emotions. He just barely knew what they were or how to handle them or figure them out. This wasn't new information.

"Alan, are you listening?" Ohean said, suddenly and just a little sharply. I started to attention.

"What, sorry?"

Ohean tapped her finger on the book. "You have to pay attention, since I can't tell what's important or not. But I read his name again."

"Who, Maedajon's?"

"Keydestas," Ohean said.

"Oh, shit, okay," I said. "Sorry, I was just—can you read it again? Please?"

Ohean looked unimpressed, but did. And kept reading past that, and suddenly the little book was the most interesting thing in the entire damn world. The fact that this Serhylas guy was so damn detailed with everything he wrote down made him incredibly boring, but also incredibly thorough. And when he started detailing the instruction he was giving to Keyd as his ykaret, he really detailed it.

He talked about everything that Keyd had to learn, and not just learn, but take to heart, seriously. The responsibilities being carried down to him from generations and generations of the ruling title being in the family. It went on for pages and pages—the duties of the bloodline, the honor and but also the possibilities for mistakes failure and disappointment, and the possible repercussions of them all. The unwavering loyalty and devotion he needed to have to their people, in order to be the type of leader that their situation demanded. Generations of pressure inexorably linked to an ancient rivalry with the other half of their race, funneling down the line of succession right onto Keyd's head.

If Keyd was barely four years old when they'd started to throw all this stuff at him, I didn't want to know what the rest of his childhood had been like. And I finally got it. Rysa hadn't given me this book so I could figure out that Keyd had emotions. She already knew I knew that. She'd given me this book so I could see why he'd made the choices he had, why he'd kept me out of knowing things about the war, why he was so focused on the responsibilities he had. How much of this had been constantly on his shoulders from practically the minute he'd been born.

He'd been a prince for fifty-nine years. He'd been my boyfriend for two weeks. Of course I had less meaning to him, it only made sense that I would. And even if he'd never wanted to be the agistar, even if he hadn't wanted any of that responsibility—he was the kind of person who would take it on anyway, because it was his duty, because it was expected of him. Because he was a stupidly noble and loyal person and because it had been infused in him from childhood.

It didn't mean that I still wasn't furious, and wounded, and betrayed. It didn't even mean I forgave him. It just meant I understood everything much more clearly. It didn't make me any less determined to do what I was here to do. Keyd was only acting the way he'd been born and bred to act, and I couldn't blame him for it. I could only react to it. I had no conception of the type of pressure and expectations that he had been raised under, and this guy Sehrylas's book, detailed as it was, was probably just the beginning of it all.

"Thanks," I said to Ohean, when she told me her eyes were swimming and she had to stop for the night. "Thanks for reading this to me at all. I really—I really appreciate it."

"I hope it helped you," she said, blinking hard and handing the book back to me. "With whatever it was you needed."

"As much as it could, anyway," I said. "Some things just can't be fixed that easily."

Ohean nodded. "Of course," she said. "You've not chosen an simple man to love, Alan." I gaped at her, just a little. How the hell had she figured that out? Had Ociir really told her, too? Or was I just pathetically obvious? Ohean seemed to figure out that she stunned me, because she smiled a little. "It's all over your face," she said. "And they way you speak about him."

"Great," I muttered. "I—but, you don't really seem bothered by it."

"What should bother me?" Ohean said. "There's nothing about it I find wrong."

"Seriously?" I said. "Because everyone else seems to."

Ohean lifted one shoulder. "Do I have to think what everyone else does?" she said. "You might have noticed that our family does not think conventionally, about quite a few things."

Well. That was true. I wondered if she knew about Ociir's separatist thing. Or Eleon, who was terrified of people knowing about the way he was. Including his family.

"What if someone else was this way?" I said, trying to ask without being too blatant. "Like, someone you really knew, and were close to."

"No, it doesn't matter," Ohean said, with no hesitation. "Love is difficult enough on its own. If people find each other, what right does anyone else have to take it away, or denounce it? "

"You're pretty cool," I said. "Seriously. And I think you and Rysa would still get along, if you see her again."

Ohean looked pretty pleased about that.

#

Eleon was still in my—well, Ociir's—room when I got back up there. He was sitting on the end of the bed. I guess he had nothing else to do but wait for me to come back around, and I felt a little bit bad about that.

"Oh, hey," I said, trying not to sound too surprised that he'd been waiting up here for a few hours. At least two, since Ohean and I had been at that goddamn little book for a good long time.

"Hi," Eleon said to his feet. He fidgeted his hands in his lap and blinked at me through his hair.

"Do you want to talk about something?" I asked.

"Y-yes…" Eleon said, fidgeting even worse. I went over and sat next to him, and he turned pink instantly. This kid could win blushing contests, seriously.

"Anything specific?"

"I don't know," Eleon said, in a way that sounded like he knew exactly what he wanted to talk about.

"Okay," I said, and just sat and waited. Maybe he needed to gear up for it. Eleon just kept fidgeting and moving around, until after a few minutes, he took a deep breath and seemed to resolve himself. He turned to me, tilting in just slightly. He was just about my same height, so we were sitting pretty equal on the bed.

"Alan," he said, and his face was still really pink. "Can I k—may I ki.."

It was pretty obvious what he was about to do without him even finishing the question. And he was moving in so slowly I had plenty of time to think about it. He was a nice kid, kind of startlingly innocent, but then again—everyone treated him like he was about eight years old. Even though he looked my age, I'd been thinking of him as being the same way. A kid. But I was—I don't know. Lonely. And Eleon was here. And liked me. It was nice, knowing that he did. Flattering, and comforting. And it would just be a kiss.

I was about two seconds from letting him do it, I really was. But then, something made me pull away, catch his shoulder and hold him back. He made a small noise, his face burned into a dull red, and he leaned away from me, ducking his face down.

"Maybe not, okay?" I said, trying to be nice about it.

"Oh," Eleon said, an amazingly bright shade of red. He was staring carefully in a completely different direction. "I—I'm so sorry."

"You've never done this before, have you?" I asked him, a little more gently. "I mean, with anyone."

Mutely, he shook his head.

Do it with someone who cares about you, I wanted to tell him. Not with me. I can't be what you want me to be. But I couldn't say that to him, because I was a little afraid that I was going to break his heart. He was so—stupidly attached to me, for whatever reason he had. But it was all just awe and accessibility. I couldn't take advantage of that.

And there was the other hand, in which I really had no draw to him. He was a nice kid and that was about it. I definitely wasn't attracted to him and I hadn't even been thinking about considering being so. The only man I'd ever really been physically attracted to was Keyd. And, Christ, if I wanted to be really honest here, maybe Law at some fairly masochistic moments. But not Eleon.

"I know you think I'm young," Eleon said, suddenly, in an embarrassed but determined mutter. "That I must only want this because you're the only one here. But I—it's more than that. There's something so different about you, Alan—you're not like anyone I've ever met. And that's what I need. How different you are. I need to—reach that, somehow. Understand why you can be this way and…"

He trailed off, still staring away from me. When I touched his shoulder, his eyes snapped back to me, startlingly bright and grey.

"—and still be so strong," he finished. His hands reached up and cupped the sides of my face, bringing us closer together. His eyes flicked intently into mine, searching over me. "I've always thought of it as a weakness," he said. "In myself, and others. You've made it your strength. I need that."

He'd stopped seeming young, very suddenly. I'd lost the feeling of childishness from him, of inexperience and naiveté. And it was starting to unnerve me. And—embarrassingly—turn me on. Shit. I guess I had some sort of thing for people who were in control. That part of Keyd had always—fuck, don't think about Keyd.

"I—no," I said, nudging Eleon back from me again. I didn't want to be an asshole about it, but I definitely wanted him to get the message. "No, look, I can't. I'm, seriously, I'm flattered, but—I just can't. Okay?"

Eleon suddenly looked like he was either about to cry, or bolt from the room, and he'd lost that brief moment of intense maturity. He was blinking rapidly as he looked at me. "I'm sorry I—tried to push you. I just really…want to understand."

"I wish I could help you," I said. "But I just can't do this. It's too much, it's too soon, I—"

"You still love him," Eleon said, startling me. "I understand."

"It's not that, it's—" Yeah, it was that, and I couldn't even pretend any different. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"You're lucky," Eleon said, with distinctive bitterness.

"No, I'm not," I said. "I'm really not."

#

I had a hard time sleeping again that night. The first night had been worse, waking up in cold sweats every hour or so, feeling sick and deeply panicked. But this night I just couldn't sleep at all. I lay there all night with my eyes screwed shut, exhausted but unable to sleep. I might have dropped off once or twice, but inevitably I would just wake up again with a jerk and a sick surge of adrenaline, and then be more awake then ever. By the time morning rolled around, I'd gotten maybe two hours of very bad, very light sleep.

I thought Eleon might avoid me after his very awkward attempt to kiss me the night before, but when Ociir inexplicably showed up at my door that morning, Eleon was there too. He did look a little more skittish than normal, and couldn't meet my eyes without blushing, but he looked determined to be there anyway.

"Uh, hey," I said, peering blearily at the both of them from the door. "What's up?"

"I thought you might want to see more of the city," Ociir said to me. "Unfortunate that it looks the way it does, but the opportunity isn't something many foreigners get. I have no duties at the temple today, I thought I could take you around, if you'd like."

"Yeah, that'd be—okay," I said, carefully. I didn't really want to see the city very much at all. Lojt, the oenclar city, had been creepy to a seriously frightening level. But, at least, Uillad had people in it. Lojt had been abandoned. And it seemed rude to just shoot Ociir down for no real reason.

"It's all right if I come too?" Eleon asked, hesitantly.

"Yeah, sure, of course," I said. "It's fine."

He hadn't embarrassed me or anything by what he'd done the night before. I was surprised, but not really that uncomfortable. I guess I just understood why he'd done it, with the kind of society he'd grown up around. And I wasn't from that society. A little bit of the same reason Rysa had thought I was so good for Keyd. Christ, I had to stop thinking about Keyd. Every two seconds I was comparing him to something or—I just had to stop.

Going around the city with Ociir and Eleon was actually more fun than I'd expected. It was interesting to see them interact as brothers, anyway. Ociir had this really protective thing going on, where he kept his eye on Eleon all the time and reigned him in a little if he got too physically far from us. Sometimes he'd keep his hand on Eleon's shoulder, or across his back. It was cute, and it made me miss my own surly brothers a little bit.

There were a lot more people out and around today than there'd been on the super rainy and unpleasant day that I'd come here. At this point, my hair had turned back into its normal, brown-blond color, not too different from Eleon's, and I wasn't looking like such a strange freak. Hardly anyone gave us a second glance, and if they did, it was at my clothes. At one point I actually saw a girl with reddish hair from a distance, who must have been just like Eleon, since she looked about the same age, or maybe closer to being a teenager. It was still weird to think that all these super-blond people around us weren't really blond, but just being possessed by entities. Kind of creepy, if I thought about it too much.

The city of Uillad was divided into districts, each of them sliced out like a triangle from the very center of the city—which was that tall spire thing in the courtyard. Apparently Uillad was a nearly perfectly round city, so its districts had been arranged out like cutting a pie. There was a residential district, a market district, and industrial or manufacturing district (they made things there, that was what I got out of it), a business district, and a 'pleasure' district, which Ociir assured me wasn't all entirely what it sounded like, although some of it was. It surprised me a little that they even had stuff like that here, but maybe it shouldn't have.

The city spire was visible from everywhere, and was a pretty good marker of where you were, and how close or far out from the middle of the city. Right now, it was way far away and hard to see in the murky blue-grey distance, so we had to be pretty close to the edge of the city. Which was confirmed when we turned onto a wide street that ended in a huge double set of garrisons with a big metal gate across them.

"The Haosean Gate," Ociir said, as we got closer to it. "I imagine you must have come into the city through it."

"Yeah, I think so," I said. Haosaen had done the same thing that the word kalach had when Asaed had said it to me—I heard it as two words. This time I heard it as meaning west. I didn't know why I was getting all these doubled-up translations here, when I hadn't really with the oenclar's language.

"It was once the main entrance to Uillad," Ociir was saying. "The road outside of it used to lead to other surrounding towns. Those are all abandoned now, and have been for a very long time. Although, one of them is used as army barracks and training grounds."

The army base was outside the city; made sense. Also made a little more sense why Eiphi and that other guy whose name I'd completely forgotten had made a rift that dumped us way outside the city. They were probably just in the habit of making them closer to the barracks, or at least it was safer to bring people of questionable loyalty to an area where some backup was readily accessible.

"They're opening it?" I heard Eleon saying suddenly, and checked back into the present. He was right. The metal door across the gate was rolling up, like it had done when I'd been brought into the city. Beyond it I caught a glimpse of that same depressing grass field beyond it, and the shadowed forms of two people in front of that, coming in through the gate.

"That's unusual," Ociir said. He put his hand down on Eleon's shoulder, like to steady him or protect him. "I wonder who…"

As the two figures came closer, I saw who. I recognized both of them, instantly. The tall blond guy with the neck scar and blind eye was damn distinctive as being Asaed, and the dark-haired guy he was dragging along by the arm was also, unfortunately, pretty unmistakable. And completely inexplicable.

It was Law. He was wearing rumpled jeans and an army-looking olive green jacket. His hair was pushed all over the place and falling wildly over his face, which was hanging down towards the ground. He was staggering along after Asaed as the guy hauled him along by the arm, not looking especially stable. Asaed had obviously seen the three of us standing there, because he stalked straight down the street to us and swung Law around in front of him, letting go of his arm.

"Convenient you're here," Asaed said to Ociir, while Law dropped straight to the ground without anybody to hold him up. He caught himself on his hands and knees, heaving and retching, his hands splayed on the ground and fingers digging in to the spaces between the stones. Asaed just stood over him, neutral-faced, apparently waiting for him to get over it. When Law finally stopped convulsing and lifted his head, he looked grayish and pale, sharp shadows under his eyes, which were wide with near-panic.

"I'm rather tired," Asaed said, sounding bored, "of people from this Earth place demanding special treatment from us."

Law went even paler at that, but his jaw set in a weird expression that looked like stubborn panic. I wasn't even sure how he was pulling that off.

"I helped you!" he bawled, his voice sounding croaky and weird. "I helped you, I—Ahieel! Ask Ahieel, he'll tell you. He'll tell you!"

That was a bad name to call on, unfortunately for him. Asaed looked unimpressed, and glanced towards Ociir.

"You know this one, as well?" Asaed asked, the eyebrow above his clouded eye lifting.

"No," Ociir said, looking a little surprised. Asaed looked like he'd expected that, and grabbed Law by the arm again and heaved him to his feet.

"Wait, I do!" I hissed at him. "Shit—don't let Asaed hurt him, okay? Just say something!"

Ociir didn't even hesitate. "Wait," he said. "Asaed."

Asaed grudgingly stopped, and turned around. Law glanced up at us with a face full of sheer panic and desperation.

"He isn't a danger," Ociir said. "There's no need to arrest him."

"Yeah," Law panted, his voice rough and thin. "Yeah, please don't."

"I can assure you that you won't be given an audience with the agistar," Asaed said, and Law made a wildly baffled face.

"I don't want to see any fucking agistar!" he said, like Asaed was completely crazy. "I don't even know what that is! I just want someone to tell me what the fuck is going on!"

I swore Asaed rolled his eyes. "I do not have the time for this," he said. He looked at Ociir. "You wouldn't want to take responsibility for this one, as well?" he said, dryly. "I've gotten reports of possible oenclar scouts in our area. That is what I need to be dealing with, not this." He gave Law a little shake.

What I'd hooked onto out of that sentence was possible oenclar scouts. If they really were there, they were just the red herrings, misleading the clarbach into thinking that the war was coming to Earth. Keeping them focused there, rather than on Clarylon.

"I—suppose," Ociir said, after glancing at me. "I could do that."

"Good," Asaed said, and dropped Law's arm. Law went right back to his knees, clutching his hands into his bangs. He really didn't look good. Ociir and Asaed exchanged a few more tightly cordial words over our heads while I went down to one knee next to Law, just to see if he was okay. He flinched away from me before I could even put a hand on him.

"Don't touch me, Alan," Law said, but with no force. He just sounded tired. "I didn't come here for that."

"What did you come here for?" I stood up again. If he didn't want help, he didn't want help. I didn't even bother to hold out a hand to help him up, and Law probably wouldn't have taken it if I had. He pushed himself up to one knee, stopped, and didn't try to get up any further. He swayed a little, and he still looked kind of pale and sick. I wasn't sure why—even if Asaed had brought him through a rift, he should have been fine.

"I told you," Law said, looking up at me. "I can't mess with this shit the way you can. I can only see it. And—things are changing, have been changing back home. But slowly—I started noticing it even before you came to my apartment. But I didn't think it was—it's just been getting worse."

"What has?"

"It's been getting darker," Law said, and that was almost all he needed to say. Except, he wasn't finished. "It's fucking weird though—it's only around our town. When you get far enough away—everything looks normal again. They started to—I mean, it's not just me noticing it, either. They mentioned something on the news. Not a lot, they said it was like a localized—I don't know, they fucking made up some scientific sounding bullshit, but it means—that it's not just me noticing it."

He was babbling, a little. I got the idea that he was pretty scared. And legitimately. After all, I was here because I was afraid of the same thing happening. And, apparently, it was happening. Whatever the clarbach were doing up in the cemetery was starting to actually affect Earth.

I glanced up at Ociir, who looked like he had no idea what to make of Law at all. Asaed had disappeared by this point, gone back through the gate out of the city. I shrugged, and Ociir shrugged back.

"What the hell do we do with him?" I asked.

"I have an idea," Ociir said, after a moment. "Alan, go with Eleon back home." Then he looked at Law. "You'll come with me."

"Wh—" Law started, and jerked back, recoiling into his jacket.

"Just go with him," I said. I didn't know what Ociir was doing but, oddly enough, I trusted him now. "If anybody here's going to help you, it's gonna be him."

Law shook his head wildly. "I don't—"

"Would you just fucking cooperate?" I snarled at him. "Jesus Christ, you're lucky we were even here at all. Asaed was probably just gonna throw you in a jail somewhere and let you rot. And Ociir might help you, so you fucking get up and go with him."

Law scrambled to his feet, staring at me like I'd slapped him. He was breathing hard and two spots of red were burning on his cheeks. Ociir gestured to him, and Law staggered over to him, looking dazed and angry and completely confused. I almost felt sorry for him. But then, not really.

"Come on," I said to Eleon, when Ociir gave me a nod, and started to herd Law in the opposite direction. "Let's do what your brother said."

Eleon fell into step with me easily enough, but he kept continually throwing looks back over his shoulder as though he could somehow still see Ociir and Law behind us long after they were out of sight.

"Who was that?" he asked.

"A—guy I know," I said, because Law wasn't my friend, by any stretch. "He's from my world."

"Oh," Eleon said, eyebrows twitching inward. "I'd heard—your world was muted. Are there so many people there who can manipulate the presence?"

"Law can't do shit," I said. "He and I are just freaks, is all. No one else ever seemed to realize what the hell was going on. My world is muted."

"Oh," Eleon said again, and looked over his shoulder one more time.

"He knows Ahieel," I added, since Eleon seemed curious. "When Ahieel was in my world doing his scout thing or whatever, Law helped out, I guess."

"Oh," Eleon said, a third time. And that was it—we were quiet all the way back to the house.

#

Ociir came back around to the house about an hour after that, and I jumped on him.

"Where'd he go? Where'd you take him?" I asked, the second that he came through the front door.

"The laemenna," Ociir told me. "He will be safe there. He may be your friend, Alan, but I'm not prepared to trust him in my home."

"He's not my friend," I said. "He's just…complicated. I don't even know what he's doing here."

"Curious," Ociir said. "He doesn't seem to know, either."

"What did he say to you? Did he say what he wanted?"

"That he wants to know what's happening to his planet, that's all the coherency I could get from him," Ociir said, and I snorted a little. Law definitely had been a little hysterical back there.

"I'll go see what the hell it is he really wants tomorrow," I said. "I mean, if that's allowed, for me to go."

"You are currently under my responsibility within the city," Ociir said. "So you may do whatever you like with my permission. But please do remember your actions reflect onto me. As do his."

"I won't do anything crazy," I promised him. "And I'll make sure Law doesn't either."

Ociir nodded. "That boy feels unstable," he said. "Dangerously so."

"What, like, mentally?" I said. That probably wasn't too bad of a guess.

"In his spirit," Ociir said, flatting his hand over his heart. "He seems very lost, very lonely. And very desperate, because of it."

"I—okay," I said. How Ociir had gotten all this from Law in less than an hour's time, I had no idea. And it didn't even seem accurate. "I'll make sure he doesn't do anything."

Ociir looked like that was acceptable enough. "This is a very strange week," he said, and I laughed in surprise.

"Yeah," I said. "No fucking kidding."

#

The next day (after only a slightly better night's sleep), I tried the clothes Ociir had given me, the ones that had once belonged to Eleon. They fit okay, and were pretty basic and unfancy, but I still felt really out of place in them. The pants were loose and long and cinched a little at the ankle, and all the shirts went down to almost my knees, with slits in the sides from the waist down, and flapped open at the flat collar. They were definitely comfortable, but felt like pajamas. The only reason I even left the house in them was because I knew other people wore these around like no big deal, so I wasn't going to look like a crazy person out there.

The place that Ociir had taken Law to, the laemenna thing, was in a long, low building only reachable from a narrow flight of stairs at the end of a bridge that spanned over another street below. It was at the border between the residential district and the pleasure district; Ociir had given me pretty good directions on how to get there. Good enough that I only got turned around once, and it was my own fault.

The front entrance was frame by two squat pillars, the doors were wooden and detailed, propped open with cast-iron doorstops. The whole building was made of pale brick and paler shingling. Inside, it was a little like a youth hostel. Bare, plain, but functional. I wasn't sure what kind of people who would normally stay here, but it didn't seem very occupied right now. There was a room with an open door right off to the immediate side of the entrance, and when I passed it, a clarbach inside flagged me down and grilled me half to fucking death about who I was, what I was doing there, who I was there to see, how long would I be there. I answered everything patiently, figuring it was just easier to go along. Finally the man waved me along, telling me that who I was looking for was in the room on the third door to the right.

The door was closed, but unlocked, when I got there, and I just went ahead and opened it. It was a little room, bare and basic, wooden flooring and brick walls. A large enough window in the far wall, glass and iron paned. There was a simple little cot against one wall and a low wooden table against another—and that was all the furniture in the entire room. One of the light globes was embedded in the ceiling, casting clear yellow light over everything. It wasn't a terrible place, but I was still glad that Ociir had offered me somewhere different to stay.

Law was there, sitting on the cot, back against the wall, hands on his knees. Just sitting, and staring straight ahead. The door hadn't been locked so I had to assume he could go in and out whenever he wanted, but he was sure acting like he was stuck. The army jacket he'd been wearing was thrown over the frame at the end of the bed. He glanced over when I came in the door, and only looked surprised for about half a nanosecond.

"What the fuck are you wearing," was the first thing he said to me. And, "why are you here?"was the second.

"Fuck you, Law," I said, the patience I'd instructed myself to keep snapping instantly. "I came to see how you're doing, all right? But if you're gonna be like this, I can just leave."

Law pressed his mouth and his hands tightly together, and didn't say anything more.

"So get up," I said. "We're going."

Law didn't move. "Where, exactly?"

"I don't know. Out. We have some shit to talk about and I don't want to do it in here. You can leave, right?"

"Yeah," Law said, grudgingly. "But only for three hours at a time."

"What, why?"

"It's just the way they run this place. Precautionary. They don't really know who I am. But I'm not a danger to them." He gave me sort of a pointed look.

"I'm not dangerous either," I said. "If I was, d'you think they'd just let me run around unsupervised? I don't think they really care about me, or you, one way or another."

Law snorted and tossed his head a little, shaking his hair out of his eyes. "That's the fucking truth," he said.

"Come on," I said again. "Let's get out of here."

"Yeah, fine," Law said. He didn't sound very enthused about it, but he climbed off the bed and grabbed his jacket and followed me into the hall. Instead of going out the front door with me, he ducked into the room off to the side of the entrance. I followed him in there, not exactly sure what he was doing.

The guy who manned this room was pulling out a big leatherbound book from a shelf when I got in there. Neither he or Law even glanced at me, and the guy handed Law a pen that looked like a real quill.

"What are you—" I started, as Law reached forward to write something down in the book.

"They told me I have to sign out," Law muttered, clenching his hand harder around the pen. "Shut up, okay? Don't fucking say anything."

I held up my hands, and kept silent. The other guy gave me an annoyed sort of look, and nabbed the pen back from Law as soon as he was done. Law sneered, took a step back, and then shoved me out of the room in front of him. I shoved at him back just a little, not appreciating the manhandling, and we had a stupid immature shoving match that ended only when we actually got outside of the building and Law tripped over one of the metal doorstops. Then we settled down, and kept walking in silence. But we only got across the bridge before I couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Why are you here?" I said, rounding on him. "I mean, what the hell are you doing here?"

Law set his jaw, hard. "I already told you," he said.

"And that's really the reason?"

"Yes, it's really the reason! Why the fuck else—do you think I followed you here?" As soon as he said it, he winced and drew back a little, jamming his hands into his pockets. Jesus Christ, awkward. I'd been trying not to think about this ever since Law had shown up here. But now it was like he'd punched me in the face and was trying to pretend he hadn't. He scuffled his feet around and glared furiously away from me, his mouth set and his shoulders rigid.

"It's really been getting darker at home," I said, and Law latched on hard to that much safer topic.

"Yeah," he said, vehemently. "It has and—Ahieel never said that would happen. He always said that—" Law broke off suddenly, and exhaled. He rubbed at a spot above his eyebrow, and glanced sideways at me. "When I told you that—you didn't know what you were getting into," he said, "I didn't know either. I thought I did. Maybe you were right, all along."

"I wasn't," I said, more startled by Law confessing that he'd been wrong than anything else. At least, he was saying it in a roundabout kind of way. "I didn't know either."

Law exhaled, and stared at me in a way that made him look both stubborn and scared. Another bizarre expression that I wasn't sure how he was even managing to pull off.

"I'm…not even sure what the right side is, anymore," he said then, oddly quietly.

I sat down on a nearby low wall, right near the bridge, shoving my hands between my knees. The thick breeze whistled through the spaces between the buildings, tugging at my hair and clothes, flapping the collar of Law's jacket up against his neck. "Yeah, well. Welcome to where I've been," I said. "And you were never any fucking help with it."

Law actually flinched. This was a totally different side of him, one I'd not even considered he might have. It made him seem more human; that he was scared and miserable and confused, and it was obvious he was. I'd only ever seen endless amounts of bravado and chauvinism come out of him before.

"I'm sorry," Law said, and it sounded like it had been a little hard for him to say. I figured I could shut up and listen, if he was actually going to make the effort. "I only ever knew what Ahieel told me. It wasn't much—probably even less than what the two you ended up with told you."

"Their names are Keyd and Rysa," I said, trying not to snap at him. He was trying, I could see that.

"Fine, whatever," Law said, but tiredly. "The point is. I came here because I needed to know what the fuck was happening. Why it was happening. I knew—I thought—that you'd be here, too. I didn't follow you," he said, quickly. "I just—I didn't know what else to do."

"You could have just stayed there," I said.

"And watch our planet turn into something like whatever this fucking place is?" Law said, waving his arms around, encompassing the city around us. "Because that's what's going to happen there, isn't it? I can figure that much out, now.

"You don't even know where you are, do you," I said, a little floored by that. Law shrugged angrily.

"Not really," he said.

"Clarylon," I said. "This is their world. This is where they all came from in the first place."

"So they even fucked up their own planet," Law said. "That's seriously comforting, god dammit."

"You've obviously changed your mind about some things," I muttered, and Law whirled on me.

"Look," he said. "I already admitted I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. And I'm sorry for—what I did. I didn't know. When I drove y—I mean, on Halloween, I had to go back to the cemetery for my car the next morning, and—Ahieel was there. He had this thing with him, like this—fucking yellow frog thing, and I guess I wasn't supposed to be able to see it. But I could, and so he did some damn mind-meld or something on me so I could understand him talk, and he said I had to help him. I kind of—he scared me. I couldn't say no." The last part he said quickly, on an exhale. Embarrassed about it.

So he'd been a macho asshole about the whole situation because he'd been terrified of Ahieel and pretending he wasn't. Christ, that made so much sense it was stupid I hadn't even seen that before. But I'd never known much about Law until just now. I hadn't realized how much of everything I thought I'd known about him was just a huge act. This person in front of me right now might as well be a stranger, one I'd never met.

"Ahieel's not a easy guy to disagree with," I said. "Or refuse," I added, remembering the way he'd somehow convinced me to let him into my apartment so he could take Keyd.

"I really didn't think he was trying to kill you," Law said. "I—I didn't know fuck, I've said that. I just thought I did. But I wouldn't've, if I had known—I just wanted you to pay attention to me for once. But it was stupid,I was desperate, and I'm sorry."

He sat himself down on the wall, but not near me at all. There was space for about three more people between us. And he didn't really look at me, either. He hunched himself into his jacket and glared at the ground.

"I'm sorry that I've always been—for all that other stuff, too," he said, carefully. 'Other stuff' seeming to refer to him treating me like shit for the nearly four years I'd known him. It wasn't much of a fucking apology, and I had the feeling it was the best I'd get. So I gave him an equally unsatisfying reply—I just shrugged. If he couldn't do better, than I wasn't going to. It wasn't mature and I didn't care. Law didn't deserve anything better than what he gave.

"Yeah, fine," I said, which was an acceptance as much as his had been an apology. I had something else I wanted to ask him, anyway. "You know, there's…a lot of things you know, that I don't understand how you do." Mainly the me-and-Keyd thing, I really wanted to know how he knew about that.

"Ahieel kept some sort of spell on, sometimes, that let me see what he was seeing," Law said, lifting one shoulder. "It didn't tell me much, but—I could put a lot of it together, what the whole picture was. I'm not stupid, Alan."

"I never said you were," I said. I'd never even thought about if Law was smart or not. Again, I'd never really cared. And I was quickly resolving to never, ever ignore a person again just because they were an asshole. Because, apparently, it could turn out to be really damn dangerous.

"You know that we—we're just pawns, right," Law said, sweeping a hand roughly through his hair. "Not even that. We're—irrelevant. They might take our help, or use what we know, but when it comes down to it, everything is about them. Their war, their fight, their victory. They take what they need, and fuck the rest of it. Both of them—both these fucking people."

"Yeah," I said. "I know." I knew that now, at least. Keyd had shown me that pretty aggressively.

"How did we get into this," Law muttered. "How the fuck did we get into this, Alan?"

"I don't know," I said, honestly. Law looked at me, a little helplessly, and I had absolutely nothing else to offer him.

#

For the rest of Law's free three hours, we just wandered around the city. Not really saying anything to each other at all. And then he went back to the laemenna, and I went back to Ociir's house. The whole thing had been weird, pretty surreal actually. Beyond that first awkward little slip, there'd been nothing mentioned about his obsessive and sort of scary crush on me. It just wasn't something we were going to talk about it. That had been easy enough to figure out. It wasn't going to come up and nothing was going to be said or considered about it. I certainly didn't want to talk about it. And Law probably really didn't want to talk about it.

It was weird enough that he was here, in this city, where there were no other people from my world, and I'd just been getting used to being the lone one out again. Law being here made everything simultaneously more real and more surreal. It was crazy to see him here in this city, but also somehow grounded me into how real this was. Other people, not just me, were involved. And what Law had told me about what was going on at home, that it was getting slightly, but noticeably, darker, scared the hell out of me.

So, the next day, I went back to see him again. Eleon looked a little disappointed when I told him I was leaving, but it would only be for three hours—or less, if Law didn't want anything to do with it. When I got to the laemenna—going through the same twenty-questions game with the same guy at the door—Law was in his tiny room, sitting exactly the same way he'd been the day before. On the bed, knees up, arms resting over them, staring ahead at the wall. And he looked—not happy, but at least more alert, when he saw me at the door.

"You again," he said, but with a kind of mild apathy, like he really didn't care one way or the other about me being here. But he pushed himself off the bed and stood, tugging his jacket back on from where it had half-slipped off his shoulders. He moved through the doorway, and I pressed myself out of the way as he did. Was he just leaving? Maybe he'd decided he wanted nothing to do with me after all, and that thought was a little hollowing. It was a little sad, but I missed being around regular people, and Law was the closest thing to.

After he'd taken about ten steps down the hall, Law paused, and turned around to stare at me. I hadn't moved from his doorway.

"Well," he said, giving me this why-are-you-such-an-idiot look I remembered real well. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah," I said, jogging a little to catch up with him. "Yeah, sorry."

After Law signed out in the record room, we left the laemanna and headed into the city. It was still cold and stormy, and the air was bitterly damp…but it still wasn't raining. I was a little envious of Law's jacket. We walked side by side, not speaking, just moving where our feet took us and not specifically deciding on any sort of direction. We went over bridges and down steps and through alleyways. The center spire of the city moved from being on our far left to being on our near right.

This was weird. Christ, were we friends, now? I didn't even know. Maybe his massive, inappropriate crush was calming down, which meant he didn't have to be as angry and bitter around me. He was definitely getting more pleasant to be around. Still a little short tempered and fast to get defensive, but he'd stopped insulting every aspect of my existence. He was tolerable. And that was a nice change.

"So, what are you doing here?" Law asked me, just before he had to start heading back to the laemenna. He hadn't actually asked me that before. And I didn't really know how to explain without going into severe detail overload.

"I'm trying to fix things at home," I said, the simplest thing I could come up with.

Law looked skeptical. "By being here."

"Yeah," I said. "Exactly."

#

Ohean read me little bit more of Rysa's book that night, but I couldn't really concentrate on any of it, and there wasn't much more in there that I hadn't already learned. Keyd had been born under a mountain of impossible responsibility and father complexes and he was determined to shoulder it all personally. Because he was a moron. And didn't know any other way to do it.

I was getting to know Ohean better, though. She was like a quieter, less forceful version of Rysa. She was very down to earth and had almost no patience for things or people that she thought were ridiculous or overdramatic, but she wasn't demanding about it. Rysa would let you know if she thought you were being stupid—Ohean would just keep it to herself.

Because she had been the next born after Rysa, they had been close. Rysa was her big sister, and Ohean had looked up to her. She had wanted to do everything that Rysa ever had, and Rysa had wanted to be just like their mother and join the army. And that had been her plan until she'd hit energy puberty and manifested oen instead of bach. And, I guess, it had still been her plan. She was still in the army, just on the other side. But Ohean hadn't continued on that same path.

"I couldn't do it, knowing that my sister was on the other side," she told me. "I wouldn't have been able to. Even if she hadn't joined their forces, I couldn't have."

"Ahieel didn't mind," I said.

"Ahieel—had the most difficulty with what happened to Ineah," Ohean said. "He joined our forces, not knowing she'd joined on the other side. But the first time he found out, where and who she was—he became obsessed. All he wanted to do was bring her back home, to be judged by the Worthies. He even knew that would mean her death. But, I think he felt she had betrayed him, personally. They were born together, grew up together, always shared everything. Everything but that."

"And he hates Keyd because Keyd practically took his place as her family," I said, really understanding that for the first time. Shit, Ahieel really had serious issues. The guy needed a therapist or something, it couldn't be healthy to have all of this obsessive hate and need for retribution constantly boiling around in him. Maybe that was why he'd finally snapped and now spent all his time sitting dumbly in the garden.

"So, you're not in the army," I said to Ohean, after another moment. "What do you do, then?"

"I make beads," she said. "And other things, but mostly beads."

"You make what?" I said. Ohean twisted her fingers into a cord that was around her neck, and pulled it out of the collar of her shirt. There was a pendent dangling off of it that looked like glass, deep blue and opaque, twisted into a complicated, delicate shape.

"You made that?" I said, a little impressed despite myself. Not that I knew shit about making beads, but it looked pretty cool.

Ohean nodded. "Ieta and I—we run our own shop in the market. She weaves, and I do this. The business is fair, we do well enough from it."

"Really," I said. That sounded…astonishingly normal. I wouldn't have expected anyone related to Rysa or Ahieel to do something as mundane as make beads or fabric and sell them in a store. But if it worked for them, it worked for them. They were just going about having a life, disconnected from the war. I wondered if she or Ieta even knew about Ociir's separatist thing. Probably not, as he'd shoved me in a closet to talk about it. But it seemed like Ohean, at least, didn't like the idea of the war, especially with a sister on the other side of it.

#

"So are you gay or what?" Law asked me, abruptly, the next day. The last day before my audience with the agistar. We had been walking aimlessly around the city for about half of Law's allotted three hours, and had stopped on one of the hundreds of bridges that crossed over the dark river. Law was leaning his back against the rail, and didn't look at me when he asked the question.

"What?" was my very suave reply, and I stared at him a little.

Law rubbed his hands compulsively against the sides of his jeans, his mouth set into a little line. He had all this dark stubble growing along his jaw, which made him look older and sharper. "Just wondering," he said, a little flatly. "If you always were, or if it's just—that guy. Because if I had thought that there was even…I would have asked you out. A long time ago."

It was such a simple, stupid admission. But it still clutched something strange and unexpected in my chest. Law—really had liked me, as unlikely as it still seemed. I knew what that was like now, to have a lot of pent up, confused feelings for someone who seemed completely inaccessible. I could empathize with him, and I wasn't sure I wanted to.

Law was staring off over the bridge somewhere, still rubbing his hands nervously against his thighs. I realized he was still waiting for me to answer the original question.

"Christ," I said. "I don't know."

Law's mouth got even thinner and whiter. "Okay."

"No, I really don't know. I'm not being coy or something stupid like that. I just don't know. Yeah, I was with Keyd, and he's about as male as you can get, but—I still don't have any idea."

"That's pretty stupid," Law said, still avoiding looking at me.

"I'm pretty aware of that, actually."

Law shifted, rearranging the way his arms were leaning on the railing, which edged him a little closer to me. I glanced at him, startled at how close he actually was. Had he been this close the whole time? "You've never done anything with any other guy," he said, not really a question.

I had to stop myself from nervously licking my lips. That would have just…been weird, right now. "No."

"All right," Law said. He took a little breath, in and out. Then he leaned in and kissed me.

I probably should have seen it coming, but I still didn't expect it, so I didn't have time to move away. It was a bizarrely nice kiss, for being from Law and wholly unplanned for and a little scratchy from his stubble. Law didn't do anything but that—he didn't touch me, move closer, try anything else. I didn't kiss back, but I didn't get the chance to pull back either, since Law only kept his mouth on mine for about three seconds. Then he jerked back hard, clamping his mouth shut and looking furious.

"Fuck," he said, turning away.

I leant back over the bridge railing, staring down at the dark, slow moving water below. We probably weren't going to talk about that ever, either. Things we weren't ever going to discuss just kept piling up. But I was really okay with not talking about this one. I was kind of disturbed by it, but not by the part I should have been. I should have been concerned that Law had just done what I'd told Eleon I couldn't—but instead I was more worried that I hadn't minded. That it was Law, and I hadn't really minded.

"I'm fucking sorry," Law said suddenly. "I know you think I'm an asshole, but I don't want to be that kind of asshole."

"I don't think you're an asshole," I said, and I didn't. Not anymore. Now I thought he was just insecure and confused, and liked to overcompensate to an extreme. It only came across as asshole behavior when I hadn't known why.

"Yeah, right," Law said, bitterly. He glared down at the water swirling past below us, his hands clenched into fists on the railing.

"I don't," I said. "I don't, and—look, it's actually nice having you here. You're not that bad."

"Compared to a bunch of pasty albino bastards trying to destroy our planet, I'm not bad? Thanks, Alan," Law said through gritted teeth. "That feels real great."

"Fuck, just—shut up," I said. "What are you, a were-douchebag or something? You were fine a second ago, why do you do this?"

"I'm sorry!" Law spat out, gripping his hands into fists on the railing. "Look, I'm not doing—I don't fucking understand how you're holding together over all this, because I'm certainly fucking not. I'm sorry if I'm freaking out and it comes out as me being a total dick, I can't help it."

"Over this?" I said, because him kissing me wasn't really something to get this wound up about. I'd almost already forgotten he'd done it. Almost.

"Not this," Law gestured violently between us, "you fucking narcissist, this—this!" He threw his arm out, encompassing the city behind us. "This whole—everything. You're just doing this like you've done it forever and I don't—how. How can you act like this is even close to normal?"

"Because I—I don't know," I said, realizing it only halfway through the sentence. I didn't know. Seemed like I really didn't know a lot of anything Law was asking me lately. "I don't. I just—can."

"That makes no fucking sense, Alan," Law said, with a tinge of hysteria in his voice. Like he was about to have a goddamn breakdown. I couldn't handle him doing that. Yeah, everything we were dealing with was massively huge on a several-world-sized scale, but if I actually started thinking in terms like that, I'd probably lose it, too. I had to keep it scaled down to people, keep it personal, close, and small.

"Why do you even like me?" I asked him, suddenly. I'd never really understood it with Keyd, and now I was even more confused as to why I seemed to be attracting men to me recently. Keyd and Law and maybe even Eleon—although I think with him, it was more that I had gay tendencies than actually being attracted to me, personally.

But it successfully diverted Law, who snapped his jaw shut and kind of boggled at me for a second. Obviously hadn't expected the question. And he looked entirely frustrated about it. "How am I supposed to answer that?" he said. "I just do. Why the hell do you like that other guy?"

"Keyd," I said. "His name is Keyd."

"I don't fucking care," Law said, more angrily, "what his name is."

"Then we're not going to talk about him."

"Fine," Law spat, pushing himself off the railing and stalking away. He headed off to the left, walking towards the end of the bridge. Dammit, he really was about as mature as a twelve year old. I punched my fist into my thigh a few times to work off some aggression, and then ran after him.

"Hold up," I said, grabbing his shoulder when I caught up with him and yanking him to halt. "See, doing shit like that—that's being an asshole. You ask me about my ex-boyfriend and then can't even handle hearing his name—grow the hell up, okay?"

"Ex-boyfriend," Law said, staring at me. Of all the things to focus on, seriously.

"You honestly think I'm here, with these goddamn people, and still with him?" I said. "Keyd basically surrendered Earth to them. You want to know why it was getting darker at home? That's why. Because he isn't going to fight for it."

"Then your ex-boyfriend's an asshole," Law said.

"I know that. Which is why I really don't need this, from you, okay? Just—quit it. Calm down. Just act like a regular goddamn person, okay?"

"I am a regular goddamn person," Law said. "It's you who isn't."

"You and I are both standing on another planet—that makes us pretty equally damn irregular," I said. "Do you seriously want to argue about who's the bigger freak?"

Law actually smiled. Not a lot, but it was there.

"No," he said, after a moment. And after another moment, he turned away and leant over the railing of the bridge again. I raked my hand through my hair—I just noticed how long it was getting, the tips of my bangs were over my eyebrows now—and braced my elbows on the railing next to him.

We were quite for a while. I appreciated that. I couldn't understand why half of the time Law could act perfectly fine and together, and then he'd turn around and be a total asshole. Maybe that was just the way he was. But I didn't know him well enough to even know that. And I'd though Keyd was hard to read and figure out. Compared to Law, Keyd was nearly an open book.

"But you are, right?" I asked, after another minute or so had gone by.

Law glanced at me. "What?"

"Gay," I said. "I mean—you're not just confused or something."

He turned away again, rolling his eyes. "Jesus Christ, Alan, what a dumb fucking question."

"Okay," I said, still kind of wondering if that meant yes or no.

Law seemed to figure that out too, because he let out an exasperated breath, rolled his head around on his shoulders, and started talking again.

"I had this neighbor when I was a kid," he said. He didn't look at me, staring down at the rushing water under the bridge instead, twisting his hands together. "I was about twelve, he was a year or two older. He was really only friends with me because we were neighbors, and I thought he was a lot cooler than me. And he knew he was cooler than me. I guess I looked up to him, in a way.

"There was this one time, he started telling me about all the girls he'd kissed. It was all of about two of them, but at that age—you know, whatever. It was like—bragging, he was telling me how to do it right and what girls liked and shit about technique and stuff. Just stupid poser stuff, like kids do. But I got—I got so jealous. Just out of nowhere, I just felt like no one else should be touching him.

"So I kissed him, just to, I don't know. I just had to, right then. He was the first person I ever kissed. And he hit me so hard that it knocked a tooth out." Law touched his hand to his jaw, like he was remembering the phobic punch of an adolescent boy. "After that he told every damn kid in the neighborhood that I was a fag. You can probably imagine all the shit I got called for the next couple of years. In school too, it got around in there. I couldn't live it down, that one stupid moment, for years.

"I only ever dated girls after that. I hated everything about it. But I—was just trapped. I couldn't do anything else. I didn't want to give in and make them right. That was I was just a fucking queerboy faggot. But it couldn't last, because I just couldn't—none of it felt right. The first guy I ever slept with was the brother of this girl I was seeing. And then she found out, and other people found out, and—it was grade school all over again. It's always just been really fucked up, with me, and this. You don't even want to know some of the things I've done just to be able to—be with someone, even if it was just one time, even if it meant nothing. It's never meant anything."

I almost said something at this point, when Law paused to take a few slow breaths. The problem was, I had no idea what to say. I felt numb and uncomfortable and uneasily sympathetic. And Law picked up again before I had much time to think about it.

"I thought about…finally being open about it, when I went to college. But I was too fucking scared. And I was too used to pretending, and hiding, and—I couldn't. I was too much of a goddamn coward. I still am. And was, when I—when I met you."

I had a sharp rush of sick panic. I didn't want to hear about this. I really, really didn't.

And Law apparently didn't want to go into detail, either. He seemed to think he'd already said too much, because he dug his hands into his hair and kept his forehead pressed against his wrists.

"So to answer your fucking question," he said, tightly. "Yes. I'm gay."

"Shit, Law," I said, because suddenly my mild ambivalence to him was turning to full-blown pity. If I had known any of this about him. I don't know what I would have done about it, but it seemed like something could have been different. I could have been nicer to him, or—I don't know. Tried to have been his friend. Hearing these things about him, I was starting to understand that he was a desperately lonely person. And had been, for a long time.

"Don't do that," Law said, yanking his head up again. "I don't want your fucking pity, okay? You asked, and I told you, and that's all. Don't—don't make it more."

But I didn't ask for your life story, I wanted to say, but held back. It had sounded like Law really needed to get that off his chest, didn't matter to whom. For me, I still wasn't even sure if I was gay or not now, but I was sure glad I hadn't been before, after hearing all that from Law. I'd never really thought about how difficult it would be, to grow up like that. And Keyd—Keyd had had an even worse time. He'd had the threat of death looming over him if he slipped up.

Actually, in a weird, uncomfortable way that I didn't want to think about very much, Law was kind of similar to Keyd. They were both closed off, incredibly isolated people, unwilling or incapable of dealing with emotions, and they both obviously hated being this way. But their ways of dealing with their problems were seriously different. Law had gotten bitter, aggressive, and arrogant in order to cover up his weaknesses, while Keyd had just become repressed and massively insecure. I wasn't even sure what the better response was, at this point. Both of them were—not at good places.

"I should head back," Law said, abruptly pushing off the railing.

I leant up off the railing myself. "You want me to—"

"Not really," Law said. The breeze pushed a clump of bangs across his eyes, and he raked them away with one hand. He stared at me, and I stared back, not exactly sure what the fuck was going on.

"Okay," I said, finally, and took a step back along my side of the bridge. Which would take me back to Ociir's family's house, the opposite direction of where Law was staying. "I'll—see you later."

Law's only response was a grunt and a shrug, and then he turned and walked away over the bridge. I watched him go, this odd little ache in my chest. I'd never really been a needy guy, and I'd never had a ton of friends ever at one time, but I wasn't sure if Law even had one friend. When Martin had started hanging out with Slayton, Law had come too—like part of the package deal. But I'd never got the sense that they were real good buddies or anything. And Law didn't seem to have any other friends—no one I'd ever seen him hanging out with.

Christ, I was starting to feel bad for Law and I really didn't have time for this shit. This what not what I had come here for—not what he'd come here for either. He'd told me that himself. I turned and headed back over the bridge, back towards Ociir's house, trying not to remember the bleakness in Law's voice when he'd told me about his past, and the hopelessness in the way he'd kissed me. I had more important things to think about—like the audience I was having tomorrow, and how I was going to have to single-handedly fight for Earth.

I cut about 6000 words out of this chapter and threw them into the next one because it was just huge. That probably means the next one will be sooner than expected.

This chapter might seem like filler but it's setting up for…a hell of a lot.