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can offer you a job where you would need to know.”
    I stopped. Only someone who has no past understands why it’s important. “Desk job?”
    “Case officer. I’ll be honest. It’s extremely dangerous. The incumbent senior on the team that your team would replace was, in my opinion, our best. The team went silent a month ago.”
    Incumbent case officers? Why not just call spies spies? Because Howard Hibble was hooked on euphemistic understatement. That also meant that when he called the job “extremely dangerous,” the job was a death sentence.
    I snorted. “Went silent? You mean went dead, Howard.”
    “I mean went silent. We’ve lost contact with teams in the field before but recovered them eventually.”
    “I was barely past rookie when I left. You must have two hundred case officers more experienced than me. Why replace the best with me?”
    “You have unique qualifications.”
    “Such as?”
    “You’ll find out as you go. If you go.”
    I wanted to know why my parents abandoned me. I wanted to know how my parents had screwed up the end of the war. Screwed it up so badly that they both got expunged from history. But I rolled my eyes up to the dark museum ceiling. “No. In fact, hell no. Howard, this rabbit-in-the-hat crap is why I quit in the first place.”
    The King of the Spooks shook his head, then dropped his voice. “We both know that’s not why you quit.”
    I bit my lip, looked away from the displays, into the dark, and swallowed while my eyes burned. “You’re right.” I blinked, drew a breath. “But I’m past that. Now I’ve got a saloon to run.” I turned and walked away.
    Howard let me stalk to the end of the corridor. Then his whisper echoed to me. “Jazen, don’t you want to know who the missing incumbent senior is?”

Six
    Dawn on the streets of Tressia was calm and greased with the oil smoke from a half-million chimneys. Polian walked, hands in civilian coat pockets, eyes cast down at the cobbles, and frowned. Not at the feel of the coat. Tressen textiles had a hand-woven texture that he enjoyed. But the day ahead was the first of the thirty-one since he had returned from the Arctic that worried him.
    He passed through a manned security checkpoint, a vestige of the day when rebel sabotage was a real threat and not just an excuse for the Interior Police to search the citizenry.
    Then Polian was within the Government Quarter of Tressen’s capital. Polian frowned again because the sterile, boxy Tressen government buildings were set back thirty yards on both sides of a boulevard that was fifteen yards wide itself. Worse, the capital city of Tressen, in fact the entire nation, was open to the sky. Polian had grown up like every legal Yavi, beneath the levels’ comforting ceilings.
    He swore as he walked. Trueborn psychologists called the Yavi discomfort with open spaces agoraphobic. Yavi psychologists called it normal. Leave it to the Trueborns to define any behavior except theirs as aberrant. The polite term for Trueborn self-absorption was “Terracentrism.” Polian preferred to call it arrogance.
    He rounded the last corner and let his eyes rest on the clinic. Its architecture was pleasantly different from the sterile Tressen boxes that it predated. Neo-Iridian, it was all white marble with arched doors and windows, crenulated parapets, for this world a regular castle. But in front of the castle squatted a long-hooded Tressen automobile, so black and anonymous that it could only be Interior Police. It was parked at the curb in front of the clinic’s arched entrance. Behind the car squatted a swollen-tired Tressen ambulance, rear doors swung open, exposing an empty interior waiting to be filled. Because half the clinic had been cleared, and now housed only one patient, that meant Polian’s worry about day thirty-one was justified.
    Polian ran the remaining distance and reached the clinic’s front doors just as a patient-loaded gurney’s end bumped them open in front of him.