Troy withdrew the crumpled piece of paper, the last sheet of the manifest he had found in his pocket. He scanned the erroneous file and erased it completely, then re-input all the items from the manifest so that every entry showed the same clock record. It didn’t take long. Troy felt pleased that he was able to eliminate the error; no one would know the difference. The Platform would get the appropriate amount of supplies, and old Sondheim wouldn’t complain about being shortchanged. Missing supplies received from the previous day’s shipment would not go astray, as had happened before, and Troy would not be reprimanded. He had saved his job.
He keyed in the last entries and sighed. The water buffalo bellowed again, louder this time, startling him. He sat up and sniffed the air, smelling something odd: wetness, a metallic scent … like hot copper. The calf lowed another time, as if confused as to why Troy didn’t rush over and investigate. He wanted to run back home—but something wasn’t right here. The back of his neck prickled.
Reluctantly, he flicked on one of the floor level lights, hoping not to attract attention from any patrolling street guards. He shuffled around the cubicles and headed toward the back of the warehouse where the animals were kept.
One of the water buffalo cages was empty. Had he lost a calf, too? He wondered how he would explain that. It was the first, most ridiculous thought to enter his mind.
Then he saw the dead man lying on the concrete floor, sprawled in an ocean of blood. It reminded him of the crimson sunset he had painted just that evening using his new pigments.
Troy stumbled forward. His legs felt like bars of iron as he plodded forward, gawking down in the low slanted light. He fixated on the blood. He couldn’t believe there was so much blood.
A bloody plastic wrapper lay across the dead man’s chest along with two sky-blue capsules. Veritas. Troy had seen that substance only a few times in his weeks here. But no shipments of Veritas had come down from the Platform that afternoon. And every capsule of the Truthsayers’ drug was supposed to be kept under tight control, heavily guarded until its delivery to Guild Headquarters.
Troy stared down, his eyes wide and dry, but he did not recognize the victim. The man’s eyes were glassy, his short hair dark and streaked with gray. The thick blood still oozed, pulled by gravity into a spreading pool around the man’s chest. A long stab wound had sliced into the ribs….
Bright lights came on inside the warehouse like flashes from a supernova. Suddenly Troy realized he had been screaming and shouting. His mind was so numb he couldn’t understand what was going on. He found himself bending over the body, moaning, his hands trembling.
Blood—there was so much blood! Did the human body even have that much blood?
Four armed sol-pols rushed in, dripping rain from outside. Upon seeing Troy, the body, and the blood, they leveled their weapons at him. “Don’t move,” one said. “You can’t get away.”
Troy stopped, blinking down at his hands. What were they shouting at him for? He had stopped screaming. His throat was so raw that when he spoke, his voice was hoarse and damaged.
“I didn’t. I didn’t—not me.”
The sol-pols approached him cautiously, rifles ready. When they saw he had no apparent weapon, they grabbed his arms, twisted them behind his back and applied the bonds.
“Uh, wait,” Troy said. “I didn’t kill him.” Terror and shock made him feel sluggish. He couldn’t think straight.
One of the sol-pols groaned, “Don’t tell me you’re going to waste a Truthsayer’s time on this?”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Troy said. “I’m innocent.”
“Aren’t we all?” the guard said.
“But I didn’t do it,” Troy insisted, letting a hint of anger trickle into his voice so that the sol-pols gripped his arms more tightly, with enough force to bruise. “I just found him here.”
“We’ll get a Truthsayer, and then we’ll find out what really happened.”
Troy closed his eyes and let them take him away. At least there was some comfort in that. The Truthsayers were never wrong.
i
In the stables on a sunny morning after an exhilarating ride, Franz Dokken reveled in the calm he experienced while brushing down his stallion: smooth, soothing strokes, caressing the velvety texture of the chestnut coat that covered the horse’s coiled muscles.
The fresh air of Atlas lit the roomy stables with the energy of blue sky and yellow sunlight. Dokken inhaled deeply, smelling the animals, the dusty ground, the rusty sourness from the corrugated steel trough.
The gray mare would deliver soon, and he already had a clean pen ready for the new foal. The other horses made restless sounds—on a day like this they all wanted to be outside, to run and roam, but he had no worthwhile place to graze them.
They ate oats and alfalfa grown on strips of his reclaimed land, and many of his workers quietly resented harvesting food for the animals rather than themselves. The villagers were puzzled by Dokken’s obsession, not understanding why he raised magnificent horses instead of “useful” animals—cattle for instance—as other landholders did. But then, it was not their purpose in life to understand his decisions. He was the landholder.
The proud and majestic beasts made Dokken feel noble. He loved the exhilaration of exerting control over an animal physically stronger than himself. It was also a way to show his villagers—not to mention the rival landholders—that Franz Dokken could do as he pleased.
After his two weeks of blessed sojourn, alone and out of touch, he felt ready to tend to all the matters that had slipped during his absence. Maximillian kept the show running smoothly while he was gone; after years and years of practice, Dokken knew how often his presence was truly required, and how many brushfires would burn themselves out without drastic intervention. He thrived on the time alone, when he could get away with it.
He disappeared at least once a month, to the dismay of Schandra. She resented the fact that he kept deep secrets from her, though even in her greatest moments of self-doubt, she didn’t dream how little she knew about his real activities. Her failing was that she overestimated her own importance to him, considering herself part of his life rather than a ten-year dalliance. She had no real perspective on time.
Dokken felt refreshed after the morning ride, and after his recent sojourn, but there was so much to catch up on—as always. It would take a few days just to get up to speed, to solve the problems that needed fixing, to tighten a few screws, yank a few leashes. Then he would set other wheels in motion, see that everything was proceeding along its inevitable course … and when the laws of human nature grasped his plans firmly, Dokken could afford to disappear again.
The reward was worth all the inconvenience.
After their long conversation the night before, Tharion had left late on a private mag-lev car, bulleting back to First Landing. The Guild Master had walked unsteadily toward the pickup spur, completely unfamiliar with the effects of alcohol and somewhat comically tipsy from the wine. At one point Tharion had accused Dokken of drugging him, which had brought his mentor to sidesplitting spasms of laughter, the first true belly laugh Dokken had experienced in recent memory. Tharion hadn’t understood the humor.
Through the stable door, Dokken glanced at the sun in the morning sky, estimating the hour. He refused to wear a wrist chronometer, since nothing in his experience required such accuracy. Dokken stroked the stallion three more times with the curry brush before