That was the summer you decided not to read stories about magic anymore. It was time to move on. You were trying grownup ones now, about people who wished to marry each other but couldn't, about heroes who fought wars, about grand adventures that ended in small, inconsequential failures. And yet there was always a lesson to be learned, same as before.\n\n<<back 'the dry death of the earth'>>
Water was seventy tod a liter then, which seemed a princely price, but it's become so much worse. You don't know how Mama managed to afford it. No one ever seemed to buy her pottery -- it was out of style, or didn't hold up over time. You don't remember what the complaints were anymore, but there were plenty of them.\n\n<<back>>
It seems as though everyone's forgotten how to speak, so quiet it is. The flags hanging from the lampposts seem older than you remembered them, only days ago. Their purples have become grays, their straight edges turned into rags. They were once so impressive. Now so old. There are people on this road walking the same way you do, but they keep to its edges, under the shadows of the buildings. Everything is closed for the holy day. The center of the road is empty; its polished stones dare you to step on them, to announce yourself. \n\nInstead you turn a corner into a Kasti neighborhood, with tiny roads and houses pressed up against each other, each taller and narrower than the next. Their windows strain for daylight. Children cut paths on bicycles through groups of grandmothers bearing sacks of ringtao on their shoulders. [[The shopping hour]] is almost over. Though you don't understand the language, it's comforting to be surrounded by something besides your own inner voice, the one that whispers: //I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared//. You're so foolish. Your heart should be stone cold now. You should have made it so.\n\nThere's a commotion up ahead, an argument -- a man on the ground, a policeman standing above him shouting. [[The police]]. You've seen it so many times before. The man carries something illegal. Everyone does.\n\n<<if not $carried>>\nEven you, today.\n* [[You carry a knife]]\n* [[You carry a satchel of explosives]]\n<<else>>\n<<display '(argument choices)'>>\n<<endif>>
You just shake your head. If you were to say anything at all it would be: //my sister//, and that would undo everything you have built in your mind. You cannot allow it. The woman mutters a blessing as you pass her, the words running together from repetition. You never understood why beggars would bless the ones who ignore them, but they do, they always do.\n\n<<display '(continue on the road)'>>
No matter how you answered, Mama would only nod. She never told you what the right answers were, nor would she ever would finish the story. But you didn't mind. You invented so many endings, lots of them where the squirrel tricked his way out again, or maybe king owl really would let him go. You didn't need to answer the question to sleep. You only had to find a way to avoid it entirely.\n\n<<back 'through the sandstone gates'>>
<<display '(story end)'>>
You cannot stand to let him speak. You do it without thinking.\n\nIt happens twice. The first time is all light and heat -- sensations alone without any pain. It is like becoming the sun. It is you who glows, you who burns. You at the center of everything flowing outwards. Your body disappearing, your energy consuming everything around you. It feels transcendental.\n\nThe second time, you scream. The second time, the world crushes inward on you, cracks your bones, rips your hair from your skin, melts you away until there is nothing left to feel. It feels much longer than the first time. \n\nThe explosion kills almost all the people sitting in the pews of the churchhouse. It cracks the walls themselves so that the building heaves -- almost collapses, but does not. The faber and his churchmen are burned badly, and the rest of their lives will be painful.\n\nThe tree is not harmed.\n\nYou are a sentence in the history of the city's collapse. You are one of the first of what historians will call 'incidents.' Each of them takes a different, painful path, but all of you have the same thing to say. And it is heard -- by whom exactly, no one can say. But it's something, to be heard.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
It was never put that way in school. There was no fate for you but your own, the texts said, and whether you believed them or not -- it didn't really matter. You chose to continue in school, Supi did too, and though you were both smart enough to pass the entrance tests, only one of you really wanted to. But those were the choices you were given. Books or the field.\n\nYou told them you wanted to become [[an astronomer]] because you loved the way the word sounded. It was the only reason you could find in all of it.
-- Astronomy being the highest calling. They named the stars after the seraphs in the holy texts, the planets after saints. Everything was in its right place. God saw to that. Mortals' business was just to chart the fulfillment of his wishes.\n\n<<back 'the dry death of the earth'>>
Before the plains there was a forest, with trees that pierced the sky and hid us all from the sun. And king owl ruled everything in the forest but a single squirrel, who had been given all the wisdom king owl had, but he had traded it all for cleverness, so he was always one step ahead of king owl. The squirrel stole acorns from the trees, and king owl loved the trees. He couldn't abide it. He came up with all sort of traps and tricks but the squirrel was too smart for all of them.\n\nFinally king owl sent for his sister, lady spider, and had her make him a cobweb and cut her with his talons so her tears would be mixed in the silk, so that nothing could break it. She hated him after that, and would find her own revenge later, but all that mattered to king owl was that he had the squirrel now. He laid a trap and caught him in the web, and as the squirrel squirmed around, he said, "Now I'm going to eat you. Not because I'm hungry but because the trees are mine, and what you steal from the trees, you steal from me."\n\n"Don't eat me, don't eat me, there's no reason," the squirrel said, "I steal the acorns only so I can bury them, so they can become trees themselves."\n\n-- At this point in the story Mama always asked: "Do you think king owl should've trusted him?"\n* [[Yes|King owl shouldn't trust the squirrel]]\n* [[No|King owl should trust the squirrel]]
<<set $carried = 'explosives'>><<display '(continue with guard)'>>
Your eyes lock with his. He is a young boy, less than eighteen, with a broad, almost bovine face. Ten years ago he might have been entirely innocent. He would work in the scrubland until his heart or his arms gave out, whichever was weakest within him. He would die without ever seeing another human being die. The pain his body felt as it failed would be entirely new to him, so that he could be in his last moments an explorer. The last thing he would feel would be pride.\n\nBut now he is a traitor, a confederate, and you'll never know why. Today he lets a woman he's never met pass into the city armed with something no one, especially a woman, should possess within its borders. He will die an ugly death. [[All blasphemers]] are fated so.\n\nThere is no way to thank him. There is nothing you can thank him for with words. You can only move forward, [[through the sandstone gates]].
"Eck-rah-sis foo-rir spinck-to," Supi said.\n\n"Eck-//ray//-sis," you said. "Like the sun's rays."\n\nIn the dark, the two of you practiced. So much time getting the words right that their meanings became secondary. To say it was an accomplishment in itself.\n\n<<back>>
!!The Question Unquestioned\n!!!by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>>\nNothing can stop the din of commerce on the eastern road. Nothing can silence the caw-caw of the roast sellers trumpeting chicken thighs three-for-one, the murmurs of the silk traders (//more money//, //less money//, //deal//), the coarse hubbub of the trashmongers. Nothing can end this noise, not even the executions.\n\nThe police have laid the bodies end to end where the cobblestone met the dying scrubgrass. They look as if they were birds migrating into the city. Believers on the north side of the road, those judged heretics on the south. The trail of black burlap shrouds stretches to the horizon in front of you. Yellow-green land, wan blue sky. Everything feels still. The smell of burnt flesh is not as bad as you had imagined. [[Your sister]] has been dead three days.\n\nThe moment you stop walking to think -- what can be thought now? what can you allow yourself? -- a woman with a crease in her forehead like a second frown rushes up to you and cups her hands in front of you, interweaving the top two fingers. The beggar's sign.\n\n"Do you have a husband?" she asks.\n\n"No," you reply.\n\n"They took him from me," she says. "They put him on this road. Please?" \n* [[Give her a few tod]]\n* [[Tell her no]]
<<display '(king owl trusted)'>>
"No, for I have pledged my soul to the question unquestioned..."\n\nYou cannot speak.\n\n"The question unquestioned..." you try again.\n\n"... The word reversed, and everything that followed," the faber finishes for you.\n\nIt is so bitter, the fruit, and hard to swallow. But you know the way. You swallow the fruit and remove a seed from your mouth, place it onto the plate proffered, and walk back along the aisle to the churchhouse doors. You point to your stomach as you pass the doormen again. It happens to some people immediately, the sickness.\n\nYou walk back through the city and leave through the gate you entered. You feel deflated. The walk home is sweaty and tiring, but at its end, Mama is sitting on the house steps waiting for you.\n\n"Let's not talk about it yet," she says to you. "Come in and eat with me."\n\n"We should," you say. "But I need to check something in the backyard."\n\nShe nods, at first confused, but then she laughs gently at nothing and goes inside. Only then, with no one looking, can you remove the seed from your mouth, the one you stole today, the one that belongs to Supi. You find a spot you like, where the shadow of the house barely touches, and bury it in the ground.\n\nThis is [[the last day you ever spend in the city]].
"There was to be a rebellion this week," he says placidly. "A revolution." He stresses that word, revolution. It is forbidden in some places. "There was a force several hundred strong that tried to take our city hall.\n\n"They thought it was a revolution. It had to be. It was anti-religion. It was anti-political. It was anti-humanity itself. What did they want? They wanted to destroy everything. They wanted this city, that has stood for so many centuries, to burn to its foundations. They wanted to erase us, all of us. They wanted their own government, their own religion, their own people. It was to be a revolution. There was no negotiation, there was no petition. It was a revolution."\n\n"But they learned a lesson this week."\n\nHe waits again. Almost smiles, maybe. The entire congregation is his and his alone to command. And then he screams:\n\n"There can be no revolution! Because the church itself is revolution!"\n\nPeople jump a little in their seats at the change in tone, but then go still again, as if afraid that that in itself is a kind of betrayal.\n\nHe continues: "What is our religion but a struggle, a holy struggle against our own nature, and everything else evil in the world. This is what we are taught. This is what God himself told the prophets. This is how our text begins: we struggle. We fight. We triumph. And if you are not an ally of this struggle you surely are its enemy.\n\n"In this revolution they promised an easier way. A //softer// path. An end to the fight. Wouldn't we all like that? Wouldn't we all like to rest? But the rest they promised was just another way of giving up. Of admitting defeat.\n\n"It should be a surprise to no one in this churchhouse, no one in this entire city, that God treated them the way they deserved to be treated. Each of those heretics. It is hard for some to see so many executed. But every struggle is painful. Every struggle is bloody. It must be. You count your victories with the pain it requires to earn each one. The blood you lose. The people taken from you. Each sacrifice, greater than the last. Each glory leading onward to heaven.\n\n"Our city is strong today. Our city will be strong forever. -- Praise to the question unquestioned, the word reversed, and everything that followed."\n\nAround you people fall into the catechism, but you cannot join them. You have never been lied to so completely. You have never heard words so perfectly formed, so well-arranged in service of something so absolutely wrong. You have never believed in evil but it stands before you today, at the head of a churchhouse in the heart of the city. It is a man, a mortal man, and you can kill him.\n\nYou close your eyes and let the rest of the service pass, until it comes time to eat from the sinensis tree, until it is time for //rit//. [[You may finally act]].
You stand frozen as the guard's hands dart across your body, grasping your ankles, tracing your calves and thighs. You are three seconds from being caught but you cannot move. His hands graze your buttocks with a practiced detachment meant to make you think he is only performing a job. There is no space in his movements to admit humanity. And then his hands touch your hips.\n\nYou feel his hands startle and your heart stops. His hands then grip knowingly, to confirm what you've hidden beneath your robes, what you carry at your right hip:\n* [[a knife]]\n* [[a satchel of explosives]]
No matter where you walk in the city, the road crumbles at its edges. The earth can't abide macadam. So it's easy to find a loose step stone and weigh it in your hand. Its underside, where it meets the tips of your fingers, is reassuringly cool. The muscles of your arm tighten reflexively. You've never done this before. You've never even thought it. But there is nothing inside you that tells you //no//, and maybe there never has been.\n\nYou throw hard as you can and the policeman never turns. He never sees you, nor do you ever learn his face. Instead the rock connects grossly with the back of his neck. A snap punctuates the air and the policeman falls to the ground, dead before his face can even crack against the road.\n\nYou can't have, but you did.\n\nYou've killed a man and saved another. You thought you would feel [[sick]] at the thought, let alone the sight of it. And yet you stand unmoving, unwavering, over his body.\n\nThe man on his knees looks at you once, then runs. There's nothing for him to thank you for. You've put him in more danger than he was before. He knows your face. You've committed a capital crime and anyone who doesn't report you is committing the same.\n\nYou skirt through an alley and take even more obscure streets, wishing yourself invisible all the way to the [[churchhouse]].<<set $attacked = true>>
You were sitting on the bed then. "Come here," you asked.\n\nYou wrapped all your blankets around her so that only her head stuck out, her hair still fine and shiny, and told her: "You have to stop. You're too precious."\n\n"I can't," Supi said.\n\n"I know," you said. And that was the end of the conversation. For a while you talked about yourself, about the small things that made up your days, about the stars and the names you had invented for them, about the people you studied with, none of whom you really loved but were fond of anyway, and as you started to tell [[your favorite story]], the first one Mama taught you, the two of you fell asleep together there, and in the darkness of your own mind, you felt more peaceful and safe than you had in a long time.
The sinensis trees, you had been told, could only endure a certain amount of light each day. Each churchhouse had a peerhole it its roof that controlled the sun's touch. The fabers spent dawn to dusk each day tending to the tree, measuring the light, watering the roots. They learned this from books written long ago, by the very founders of the city.\n\n<<back>>
The way it works is simple. The policeman will ask if he has contraband; he lies in response. The policeman will push further; the man will lie again, more intricately than before. And then the policeman will beat him a little -- not hard enough to turn anyone on the street against him, though -- then wrap his wrists in manacles, bring him to jail where the whole gang of them will strip him, search him by force, beat him for real. You know what will happen, and how to prevent it.\n* [[Help the man]]\n* [[Turn a corner and go around the scene]]
It is easy to do the most forbidden thing in the world.\n\nIt is easy to hide a seed at the back of your mouth. The seeds are small, only a little larger than a kernel of corn. They taught you the sixteen unforgivable crimes -- you had to recite them to pass fifth grade. They had long, abstract descriptions that had to be remembered too. //Ephra//: the murder of another human being for reasons contrary to the holy texts, or without the dispensation of the church. //Callexis//: seizure of another's material body without recompense or matrimonial bond. In the playground, your class figured what they all meant except the last. //Pakaran//. Disruption of the order of life.\n\nSupi had figured it out. She was stealing from [[the world itself]].\n\nAnd what she whispered? "You can't tell [[Mama]]."\n\nYou said nothing to her, just looked straight forward until the ceremony was done and you were allowed to go home. You refused to speak to Supi about it at all on the way home, like she had belched in the middle of the ceremony. It was -- it was too much for you to grasp in your mind. She didn't seem to mind, though, or even want to talk about it.\n\nThat night you had nightmares, terrible nameless ones. But that was what the sinesis did to everyone. They had told you in school that the fruit brought your own evils up from the deep part of yourself, that the nightmares were their last cry of pain as they were extinguished. You lay in bed thinking of what could be wrong inside you, what could have needed to be erased. And while you did, Supi slept soundly in the bed next to yours. You could hear her breathing so evenly, like she was asking a question and answering it in the same motion.\n\n<<back 'Start'>>
"I am indeed," you say. It seems the most credible way to enter the city; you haven't changed your clothes in four days and you've barely slept ten hours in that time. You worry, though, that you make yourself sound dishonest by speaking so beseechingly. Does a beggar believe that anyone could save her? Surely not. \n\nBut subtleties seem to be lost on the gatesman. "Tax today's seventy-five nod," he casually recites. Almost everything left in your purse. Not even enough for a meal -- though the food in the city tended to turn your stomach anyway.\n\nYou toss it into the tithe-basket beneath the gatesman's post, and the guard standing beside it nods you forward [[through the sandstone gates]], his eyes already on the next entrant, scanning for any signs of betrayal.
<<set $carried = 'explosives'>><<display '(argument choices)'>>
You had her sit on your bed while you drew the bath. You felt a little bad about it because you hadn't bothered to make the bed, so she sat in a crinkle of blankets on the edge of the bed, waiting for whatever you would do next. And that was the funny part. You felt as though you were repeating something you had done many times, though it was all new to you, every moment. Like you were reciting a multiplication table for a quru.\n\nYou undressed her, the way Mama did you both when you were little, and led her into the bathroom. You saw all her scars without meaning to. You wish you could say you didn't want to -- but you did. Even now you can draw a map of them. The largest went around the circumference of her stomach. A single slow stroke. When she turned away from you, there was a blot of blood on the small of her back.\n\n"Wait," you said and fetched the washcloth from your kitchen. You started to wipe the blood from her but the motion re-opened the cut. All you could do was press the washcloth against her body and watch it turn flush red in your hands.\n\n"Here, get into [[the bath]]," you said when it seemed she would bleed no more.
You knew before it happened, somehow. You knew what you would see when she opened her hand.\n\nShe had [[stolen a seed]].\n\nStolen.
<<set $helpedBeggar = true>>The coins are hot in your hand. The day's heat has already begun but the wind is nowhere. It will be a hard day, no question now.\n\n"Thank-you thank-you," the woman says. "I'll eat today and think of you."\n\nHer smile made of yellowed teeth means nothing to you. You can't even tell if she means it. You've never had your sister's savvy, so your choice is to either believe everyone, or believe no one. Which is really no choice at all. Instead you say nothing to her. You are alone and you shall ever be.\n\n<<display '(continue on the road)'>>
The Kasti were allowed commerce even on holy days as a concession when they went on strike three years ago. They're the largest ethnic group in the city so the holy fathers couldn't simply crack down on them. Instead they let the Kasti have their groceries on Fridays. You talked about it when you were a student. You all agreed they were foolish for accepting something so small, so pointless.\n\n<<back>>
You barely spoke at all inside. You paid the surety and took Supi by the hand. It was you who led her from the jailhouse. You never understood why she seemed to resist at first. All the rest of the detained students had been bailed out by their families hours before this.\n\nWhen you stepped outside it was as if you were entering a different place than the one you occupied before. The air was alive with the sound of crickets and the streetlights seemed brighter, or tinted a slightly different shade. You tried to imagine how everything seemed from Supi's perspective. What a relief it must have been to be out of that jail.\n\nOnce you were four blocks from the jailhouse you began [[the speech you rehearsed]]. You imagined spies hanging around that place, just listening for new dissidents to reveal themselves.
You are kneeling at the faber's feet, the way you've done so many times before. The faber leans downward, so that his face is even with yours.\n\n"Have you come to be converted?" he asks.<<silently>>\n\n-- we have to manually compute a string of choices to render,\n-- otherwise spacing gets screwed up\n\n-- encode our angle brackets and newlines so the parser doesn't get confused\n\n<<set $nl = String.fromCharCode(10)>>\n<<set $choices = '* '>>\n\n<<if $carried eq 'knife'>>\n <<set $choices += "[[Stab the faber]]">>\n<<else>>\n <<set $choices += "[[Ignite your explosives]]">>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<if not $attacked>>\n <<set $choices += $nl + '* [[Tell him no]]'>>\n<<endif>>\n\n<<endsilently>>\n<<print $choices>>
The first day of classes you had forgotten your books, just looked down when the quru asked the class to read, pretended to play along, pretended you fit in there.<<if $helpedBeggar>>The talk of [[stars]] seemed as magical an incantation as anything spoken in the churchhouse.<<endif>> And everyone believed you. So you know how to lie. You can do it today.\n\n<<back>>
The doormen frown at you but motion you inside; you've arrived just as the timpani bells have begun ringing, to call the people to order. Outside, the bells sound like a drawn-out roar, a tone low enough never to hope to become music, [[a thunderstorm that shall never arrive]]. When you step inside, the floor is shaking with the reverberations. You can no longer hear the sound of the bells; you are inside it, immersed in it. You walk slowly down the aisle, trying to make as small a presence of yourself as you can. You can feel people's eyes on you, and the waves of the bells seem to collect in your stomach, as if they would tear you apart.\n\nYou've never been to this churchhouse before; you chose it because it's the city's holiest, and also the largest. There are perhaps fifty rows of pews that stretch wider than a pelan court. You've heard that usually there's a line to get inside and a yearly tithe to pay if you'd like a seat at the front of this churchhouse, so that you might spend your time here close to [[the sinensis tree]]. It's a destination unto itself, a trip to take once in a life. But the rows are sparsely filled this morning. Of course everyone knows why, but there's some kind of fiction at work here, an unspoken paper-thin lie that maintains the order of things. You find a seat near the middle, look around cautiously and reach for the prayer-book at the foot of the pew and pretend to page through the week's recitations. There's a low murmur of conversation that somehow barely rises above the bells. The plush seat's too comfortable to put you at ease.\n\nWhen the bells cease, the air is suddenly suffocating. The sunlight catches motes of dust drifting through the air, weightless, and then [[the faber enters]] with his retinue.
You can't afford to be seen by anyone important, let alone the police. There's too much that depends on you. You sidle into an alleyway, routing yourself through quiet roads and forgotten intersections toward the [[churchhouse]].\n\nYou hear the man cry out. You can't escape the sound. It will be much worse for him soon but you don't pity him. They will let him go. They always let the innocent go, after a time. There is some basic sense of justice still left. He will escape. You won't.
"Supi's sick."\n\nThis was the lie you made up when you returned home to see Mama for Pommick. Supi had refused to leave the city for any reason, and there were plenty of people in her group who would take care of her while you were gone.\n\n"She should have come home, I would have liked to take care of her," Mama said as she sliced up her chicken. "It's not so far away."\n\nA tight feeling passed through you. You had never really learned to lie, not how Supi could. The stories came to you in small bits, spread out so that it was impossible to make it sound real. You tried your best to sound a combination of emotional and forgetful, whichever would make more sense to Mama. "She was in a state, she could barely get up out of bed her fever was so bad. I wanted to stay with her, but she wouldn't let me. She...\n\n"... Well, she wanted to make sure I brought you a present."\n\nMama laughed at this. "A present from Supi?"\n\n"Yes... well, this..." You unclasped the monoscope from around your neck and gave it to Mama.\n\n"[[What is it?]]" she asked.
The Question Unquestioned
You didn't understand what she meant by her reply, but instead of asking, you stood frozen to the spot. Never were you so powerless. The next day she would be arrested. Three days later the executions would be announced. Without knowing it you could feel what would happen in your heart, but your mind failed you. You couldn't think of a single way to prevent it. There was no way at all to save your sister.\n\nYou brought your hands to her face, smudging the sharp points of the diamonds on her cheeks. You opened your mouth but only bit down on your lips to keep yourself from crying. Supi was so much stronger than you. She was so much braver than you. You were nothing. You were standing alone in the rain, the water rushing around your feet. A lost girl. A blind girl. You never saw her go. You didn't turn to wave to her. You let her vanish instead.\n\nBy the time you had reached the door to your dormitory, you wanted the moment back. You wanted all of them back, so selfish you were. There was another way, you thought. There had to be, but it was gone from your grasp. You had thrown it away. You could do nothing at all then but go up to your room, to a warmth you didn't deserve and a calmness you didn't want.\n\n<<back 'churchhouse'>>
They say the world rains so it can wash away all its old troubles and make room for the new ones. The streets were flooding that night, which no one could have expected. The rainy season had passed months ago. You were so preoccupied keeping your clothes from getting soaked in the rain gulleys on the way back from dinner that you almost missed Supi. She didn't look like herself. She had tied her hair back and someone had painted her face in diamonds. But there was more. She was worried, and you had never seen her worried.\n\nYou knew [[where she was going]] but you asked anyway. She grasped your shoulders with both her hands and told you she loved you. Time stopped but the rain kept moving. Somehow you don't remember the exact words she used -- it was more complicated than just "I love you," but your memory has elided everything but that, so that in your own mind, all Supi did there was tell you over and over again that she loved you.\n\n"Don't go," you said. (You should have said, "I love you too." It was your last chance to do it.)\n\n"[[It's not my choice]]," she said. "And it's not yours either." (She should have said, "I won't.")
<<set $carried = 'knife'>><<display '(continue with guard)'>>
You place one foot in front of the other until you are alone with the quiet of the <<if $helpedBeggar>>world and [[the dry death of the earth]]<<else>>world<<endif>>. Very little grows at the very edge of the city limits -- the sun's too bright and the soil too parched -- and very little can call it home, save for carrion birds. No one is meant to live here, and yet everyone must pass through it on the way to //rit//.\n\nYou walk with your eyes on the skyline, on the domes of the [[tennar]]. The hard click of the soles of your shoes is your only company. There may be other people walking the road this morning but you cannot admit them into your sight, into your understanding.\n\nYou cannot know, either, how long it takes to reach the [[city gate]].
You were walking to lunch when you saw Supi in the courtyard asking for [[Herrata]]. It was a constant feature of tennar then, always someone trying to get a petition signed or a new member recruited for whatever reform group had been invented that week. There were so many names, all of them longer than you could say in a single breath. You knew Supi was friends with those kinds of people, but she didn't seem to take it as seriously as everyone else -- at least you thought so.\n\nShe tried to pass you a billet like you were some stranger, but you pushed it away.\n\n"It's foolish," you said.\n\n"No it's not, not to want to change the world."\n\n"That's not what I'm arguing. I'm telling you you're asking the wrong questions."\n\n"Explain it to me," she shot back.\n\n"I mean" -- you felt conspicuous suddenly. Who knew who was watching you? There were always rumors of spies in class, watching for doctrine-breakers. You had already stopped going to the churchhouse and you felt that could not go entirely unnoticed. "I mean if you're going to ask for honey porridge, ask for honey porridge. What is Herrata going to give you?"\n\nYou snatched the billet from her hand. It was theatrical. "Freedom of speech? Freedom to believe? Then ask for it; don't talk around it like you're going to fool people." Then -- "Everyone knows there's no point in asking for free speech because we already have it. We just don't have the freedom to lie."\n\n"That's what //teachers// say," Supi said, and she turned away. She was right. That was what they told you all the time in class, and you never believed it, either. You said it only because you wanted to hurt your sister, and you didn't know why.\n\nYou ate lunch by yourself, same as always, but this time things felt different, like the world had changed a little bit in your conversation with Supi. You felt... powerless.
She stepped in and began washing her arms languidly. You turned to leave, started to close the bathroom door behind you.\n\n"Where are you going?" Supi asked.\n\n"I forgot something," you said.\n\nShe let you go then. You gathered up her clothes and your washcloth from the other room and took them outside, threw them in the trashbin. Made them anonymous that way. The next day you would buy new clothes together. When you came back in, you thought of returning to the bathroom, to make sure Supi was alright, to ask her -- you didn't know what... but instead you started to clean up, so that when she came out wrapped in a towel fifteen minutes later, [[the room was immaculate]].
"Why did you choose astronomy?" Supi asked out of nowhere one day. In those days, you ate together in the tennar lunchroom. You were best friends still. Well, really you were only-friends. Supi was the only person there that you really talked to. You found you weren't good at talking to strangers. You had trouble thinking of things to tell them.\n\nYou played with a stalk of lemongrass in your soup, trying to think of an answer to satisfy Supi. The real reason is that of all the things tennar could teach you, astronomy had the nicest sound to it. You could have picked any of them, really.\n\n"I guess I like the sky," you said finally, but Supi's eyes were far behind you. She was waving to someone.\n\n"Who's that?" you asked.\n\n"Nobody," she said. Supi had lots of friends -- [[secret friends]], as you thought of them. She refused to tell you any of their names, wouldn't let you come along to any of the parties she was invited to, wouldn't even tell you how she met them.\n\nThere was [[a pause]] in the conversation.\n\n"Well why history, anyway?" you said.\n\n"Because it's all lies."\n\nYour spoon fell from your hand into the broth and sank to the bottom of the bowl. Until Supi said that, you had never even dared to think it. And yet you agreed with it as soon as she said it.\n\nYou said: "Don't talk like that." Because even then, you knew that it was trouble to say such things out loud.\n\nShe laughed at you and tucked into her own soup.\n\n<<back 'tennar'>>
No one asks why you don't return to tennar. There's enough trouble going around that no one wants to know yours. You hear little snatches at market of what happens in the city, and each month the news grows worse. When fall returns, you apprentice yourself to Mama. You never learn to love pottery the way she does, but it's the best thing you can find to learn. It doesn't hurt anyone, it can't hurt anyone, and the truth is you don't trust yourself sometimes. And there are benefits to it. It's enough to keep you both fed and safe, and most weeks you earn enough to buy extra water, for the seed that still lies dormant in your backyard.\n\nLess than a year later, the news is that the government is finished, that the city has collapsed into civil war and no one is safe inside it. The churchhouses are full of the dead. You don't feel anything when you hear this. You can't. Instead you return to Mama's house, to the backyard, where the smallest of seedlings has found its way above the ground.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
"It's -- I don't know what it is," you said.\n\nShe held the lens up to her eye. "Oh! It's a magnifying glass."\n\n"Maybe," you said, lengthening and uplifting the word with your voice, trying to say: //I don't know, what do you think?// "She said she would tell you what it was when she was better."\n\n"It's a funny gift," Mama said. "My sight's not going yet." Her voice was curious, not angry. She was never angry around you.\n\n"No, it's not," you said. In truth the monoscope was much stronger than a fossil glass. It was for viewing the stars and planets. You could even make out clouds on Polari with it. But you couldn't have told Mama that. Supi studied history. Yours was the world made up of stars.\n\n<<back 'Help the man'>>
You had kneeled at the head of the churchhouse many times, but this was the first time you were allowed so close to the relics. They seemed smaller than before, less fantastic. The silver plate that the faber carried the halved sinensis on was just a plate. The knife he split it with was only a tool. These were the things man had created. Further behind them, past the bronze half-palisade, was the tree itself. Its smooth bark seemed to give off a light all its own. Its branches reached to the peerhole like a person's arms might toward heaven, once glimpsed. Somehow the sun loved it, treated it gently. And the tree reflected that warmthtowards you. In its presence you felt more alive than you ever had. \n\nThe sinensis the faber presented to you seemed a small token of this. A token, but inextricably linked to the tree. The deep orange rind, the crimson interior. These were the only colors you would remember from that day.\n\n"Do you come today to be converted?" the faber asked you.\n\n"No, I've already pledged my mortal life to the question unquestioned, the word reversed, and everything that followed."\n\n"Why do you kneel?"\n\n"Because I have come to pledge my immortal soul."\n\n"The flesh of the fruit is our bond," the faber said and placed the blood-red crescent of sinensis in your hands. You watched each other as you ate. He seemed angry but you couldn't think of a reason why. Like he thought you didn't belong here. At first taste the flesh was sweet, sharply so. And then it yielded too quickly to sourness.\n\nThere were three seeds in the wedge. With as much dignity as you could manage, you removed them from your mouth and returned them to the faber, who tapped them into a small velvet bag.\n\n"What dies will grow," you both said in unison. You [[had done it]]. \n\nSupi was waiting for you back in the pew. Smiling [[so dangerously]].
"No. I am no one."\n\nYour words seem to hang in the air a moment too long. This was not what you meant to say, what you had rehearsed last night, the lie that seemed most easily peddled. And what's worse is your voice came out defiant. A rebel's voice.\n\nYou try hard to bend into plain arrogance. "I am no one," you amend. "No one but a pilgrim from Aracan to celebrate //rit// with the people of this city."\n\n"Papers," the gatesman says.\n\n"They were stolen," you say. "I was robbed by unbelievers while I slept on the road last night."\n\n"Search, then," he says, and the guard on the ground beside the gate moves toward you.\n* [[Let the guard search you]]\n* [[Protest]]
He wears deep purple robes; bears full regalia on his head, normally reserved for high holy days; looks deeply angry. His walk to the dais is mechanical, as if each leg has been given separate sets of instructions. He stands rock-still while the rest of the churchmen fan out beside him, each holding a relic. They wear the same robes as the faber but walk with none of his authority. To do so would be disrespectful.\n\nThe faber waits a moment, and the churchhouse is completely still and silent. He seems to rest in that silence, lets it abide, grows powerful in it.\n\nThen he opens the holy book and reads the opening verses without preamble, catching the archaic stresses perfectly in a clipped, academic voice. Speaking as if he were graded by the almighty. You cannot follow what he is saying, you've never heard the old tongue spoken so quickly, but you look down at your text anyway to try to find where he is -- and then he stops speaking, and no one reacts. Again resting in that silence.\n\nAt last he speaks once more, this time in the common tongue. "Today," he says, "Today marks a new beginning for the faithful, and for this city."\n<<if $carried eq 'explosives'>>\n* [[Ignite the explosives]]\n* [[Let the faber continue]]\n<<else>>\n<<display 'Let the faber continue'>>\n<<endif>>
This protest was different from any other you had seen at tennar. It had momentum right from the beginning because it was daring. Storm the tabernacle, the plan was, and refuse to give demands to anyone but the holy fathers themselves. No one had ever tried to break the tabernacle's security cordon. No one knew what would happen -- and that idea, all by itself, was alluring enough to draw in almost everyone.\n\nYou began seeing people you didn't recognize on campus. You didn't know then, but each one was organizing a group unto itself in the city. People were coordinating in a way they had never done before. It only seemed more dangerous now. It didn't seem the great leap it would become.\n\n<<back>>
No one had ever seen him, but there was talk, so much talk. Herrata the hero of the oppressed, the liberator, the prophet. You really did think it was nonsense. He was everything to everyone, a dream but not a road.
"And do you think king owl actually //did// trust the squirrel?"\n* [[Yes|King owl did trust the squirrel]]\n* [[No|King owl didn't trust the squirrel]]
Your sister used to accuse you of skipping words. You read so fast you finished your homework in half the time Supi did. She had to hear the sound of the words in her head to understand them, and you didn't. She had to work to understand. You didn't.\n\n<<back>>
At the time, you assumed she was ashamed of you. There is no doubting that she was graceful where you were awkward. But looking back on it, she was protecting you.\n\n<<back>>
The oldest one in the city and the largest. Its branches knit through each other so that from a distance, they appear as a cloud. People claim its fruit adds a month to your life each time you eat it. Of course all sinensis trees are equal in God's eyes, but there is room enough in the church's faith to let a little superstition in. It helps people believe, maybe.\n\n<<back>>
"We're late, hurry up," Supi yelled from the front of the house.\n\n"I'll be there in a minute," you replied. "I'm almost done."\n\nYou really didn't care about your first //rit//. You had three pages left in //Scarlet Woods// and you had to know what happened at the end. It was maybe the first grown-up book you really loved. Your eyes [[flew across the lines]] fast as you could manage --\n\n"Sara." She was standing in the doorway in her holy robes, holding your own in her hands. There was a silent part to the accusation you chose to ignore.\n\n"Okay, let's go." You put down the book, left the hero waiting at the edge of the woods to see if the magic he had found was strong enough to bring his love back to life. Such a plotline but you loved it. It was what you wished being an adult would be like -- quests and tests and maybe love.\n\nYou remember how itchy the robes felt at first. How awkwardly you walked with them on. But you don't remember the road. It's strange. Maybe you didn't notice what it was like because you saw too much to remember, or maybe all the years between then and now took it away. All you really remember of the rest of the day was [[the ceremony]].
"What are you doing?"\n\n"I'm watering it," Supi said, her face flushed. She was kneeling on the ground, her black hair pulled back with a lindi band. She was working her fingers into the dirt, digging little rivulets. The tips of her fingers were caked bright red and for some reason this her made seem older than you, almost adult.\n\n"Where's the water, then," you said.\n\nShe had set up behind the house, told Mama that she was building a miniature kiln. Mama saw through it in a blink but she let Supi have her room. Both of you were twelve. The age you were to [[decide what you would become]].\n\n"I'm not [[crazy]]. I'm doing a cutting. I read about it."\n\nA bundle of drybursts, a nasty kind of weed that grew around the edges of the house, lay at her side. You hated them. Their prickles drew blood when you went barefoot.\n\n"That's not a cutting. You're doing it all wrong," you said.\n\n"How would you know," she said flatly. With a pointed motion, she snapped the stems in two and held the break over the dirt she had raked. And -- so slowly, as if it were Supi's will alone that drew the liquid forward -- the tiniest of drops fell from the drybursts.\n\n"You're not even thinking of the light. It's never going to grow," you said. You would [[regret that]].\n\n<<back 'Give her a few tod'>>
<<display '(story end)'>>
Nothing grows on these plains, that's what they say -- nothing but rocks. Of course it's not really true. There's plenty of scrub, enough to live on by itself though it tastes like the dirt it grows in. But nothing flowers except the sinensis trees. Nothing else bears fruit. It's the most precious thing in the world. That's why the church protects it. -- That's what they told you when you were a child.\n\n<<back>>
You see very little. You don't see the faber's body dissolve into flames with the explosion's first breath; you don't see the churchhouse shudder and its walls crack; you don't see the sinensis tree, oldest, holiest, die in the fire. Everything you've done today is so that you might murder it. There is no reason in it, you know that, but you are done with reason. It never served you.\n\nYou don't see the streets of the city burning weeks later. All of them. You don't see this moment as the one that finally ignites the people of the city against its rules. All the hate, once turned inward, that cannot be controlled once spoken aloud. You don't see the corpses lying in the street, the buildings transformed into rubble. You don't see all the loss that follows yours.\n\nYou see so little, but you feel so much.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
"No," you mean to say, but your voice twists into a howl, a scream choked back deep in your throat -- and your arm moves in a quick, tight arc, bringing the point of the knife into his chest. There is so little resistance.\n\nHe coughs, and his body tenses. That's all. As if you have stabbed a statue. The churchhouse may have become a madhouse around you but you are blind to everything but the knife in your hand. You can hear nothing but your own breathing. The knife. You aimed too low. This isn't a mortal blow. With both hands you pull the knife upwards and then, then -- then the blood begins to run in a vulgar stream, staining your hands, pooling at your feet. You jolt up, suddenly terrified, shocked even, and you can hear the world again. It's screaming, all of it, and shaking stronger than the timpani bells could ever render it. Everything you see falls away from you, like you are flying into the heavens above. Strong hands are on your body, pulling you away now. You don't see the faber die. It's all like a dream. They're dragging you away. Your feet don't touch the ground anymore.\n\nIt takes a long time for you to lose that dreamlike feeling, and then things are very hard for you.\n\nThe trial takes months even though they torture you into confessing five times over before they even file a charge. In public, they give you no name and tie a sack over your head, to hide the scars they've burned into you and to keep the people from turning you into a hero. Once they convict you, they kill you slowly. That part is better left untold. Your dead body is laid on the south side of the road to the city, with the heretics and unbelievers. You never learned which side it was that they placed Supi on. Maybe you are with her forever. Maybe you aren't. If you had a wish to make after you died, you would spend it on that.\n\nIn the years after the city falls, people wonder about you -- who you were, why you did it. There are lots of guesses. The clues are everywhere. But no one can really say anything for certain, and in their imagination, you live forever.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
"No," you say. "I am a Tristine and I must not be touched by a living man." You start to back away but your robes twist round your ankles and you fall hard onto the ground. Your palms sting where you tried to catch yourself and you hear a hiccup of laughter from the crowd behind you, like this is street theater.\n\n"Those without papers must be searched," the gatesman says evenly, as if he's choosing to ignore your outburst out of politeness. "[[Do you wish to disobey the law?]]"\n\n"No," you say, pushing yourself away from the guard with your feet. You mean your words as a continuation of your protest but they come out pitifully. And the worst is that they let you go. You are not detained. You are not interrogated, not arrested, not tortured. Not executed.\n\nThey let you live. You are that unimportant.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
Pauses were how you learned to stop eating together. There was never a moment where you agreed on it. There just seemed fewer and fewer things to talk about. Longer and longer silences. Finally all you could talk about was Mama, and it had been months since you had seen her, so all you could do was tell worn-down stories to each other that you both already knew the endings to.\n\n<<back>>
It didn't make sense. You were the one who read books about things that never happened. It was you who should have inhabited a fairyland. But it was Supi who believed she could grow a sinensis tree in her own backyard, not you. You watched Supi spend that summer trying different things for hours each day, trying to get the seeds she had planted to sprout. She sometimes would even talk to the ground, as the seeds were only waiting for a kind word. Or maybe a [[magic]] one.\n\nYou didn't speak to Supi about this, nor did you help her, except at the very end of the summer, when it was almost certainly too late. You prayed to God. Bashfully, shamefully. You prayed in your own words, confusing stumbling sentences, and asked God to make the seeds grow even though it was a crime in the faber's eyes. You thought that if the sinensis was God's fruit, then he would like it to multiply. You thought he might allow it to happen.\n\nHe didn't. Summer ended and fall began. It was the last year of grade school before you would go to tennar. With new books you were able to forget what happened, but Supi never found the same comfort in school you did. She didn't have those kinds of luxuries.
This is the beginning of the arrest litany. Silence must be interpreted as //yes//. This you were taught in civics class.\n\n<<back>>
"You below, are you a convert?"\n\nThe gatesman's face is fat, what you can see of it from his post fifteen feet above you, and though a line of fifty entrants stands waiting behind you, he speaks slowly. He has the voice of a man who has nowhere to go, no need to rush his sentences.\n\n"No," you state, "I have already sworn my life to the question unquestioned, the reversed word, and everything that followed." You hear an echo behind your words: the litany repeated by other entrants standing before other gatesmen, like a final, barely pronounced prayer.\n\n"Then are you a beggar?"\n\n(He means to insult you. This should be the last question he asks.)\n* [[Yes|A beggar, maybe]]\n* [[No|No, not a beggar]]
<<display '(king owl trusted)'>>
Even back when you were a child, Mama's legs were too weak to go to //rit//. She had enough strength to go to the market, to walk you to school, to knit scarves for you when the winter turned cold. But she wasn't strong enough to walk the road.\n\n<<back>>
Supi had to lead you by the hand. The sun from [[the peerhole]] was so bright that you could only bear to keep your eyes half-open, so that everything seemed to be dark shapes caught in a painful white light.\n\nIn return you translated for her when the faber read the holy text. He spoke in a slow monotone, like only a single musical note had been written on the page instead of the sentences formed in the old tongue. //We the blessed shall only hear the song of the tree. No other music shall move us. We the blessed shall eat only the fruit of the tree. None other will satisfy us.// Supi leaned into you as you whispered, like you were divulging to her your first secret.\n\nWhen the time for //rit// came, she gripped your hand tightly. Not to push you forward to the receiving line (though she did, eventually), but because she was scared. You could feel it in the tremble of her pinky. She had something planned. You could divine that, but what it was exactly, [[you couldn't have guessed]].
"First of all I want you to know that I'm not going to tell Mama about this, because you should be allowed to make mistakes and Mama shouldn't have to know this anyway, but don't you know what you're doing? //I want the same things you want//" -- you hissed this part -- " but don't you know we can't change anything, not like this? It's just a stupid protest. They did this last year and the same exact thing happened, and they'll do it next year too. And now it's going to be in your school records, and what if they take away your scholarship, can you think of that? What would you do then? The fields, the fucking fields, you can't do that, and now what? They watch people, you know that. If they hate you they'll destroy you."\n\nYou had lost track of what you meant to say-- there was something else important you had to tell her--\n\n"Sara," she said.\n\nYou looked up. For some reason you had been counting the cobblestones as you were talking -- and asked, "What?"\n\nShe drew back a sleeve of her shirt and showed you the price of the protest. It was a small demonstration that couldn't have been more than fifty people, but there her price was: a thin line that traveled lengthwise up her inner arm. It could have been mistaken for a vein if it weren't so straight.\n\nThey did it to her with a razor, a little common thing. They did it to her [[nineteen times]].
<<set $carried = 'knife'>><<display '(argument choices)'>>