Chapter 1

The sound of the train was hypnotic. It dulled his mind and made his limbs feel heavy. It made it easier to pretend he wasn't here, and none of this was happening.

It was, after all, patently ridiculous that he, Ashleigh Trine, minor rebel and utter clueless nobody, could ever be treated like this. Like a dangerous criminal, a rogue Talent, too nasty to hang. It had to be some kind of stupid dream. A very long stupid dream, a prank that had gone about three months too far. Any minute now one of those Watchmen in the white coats would come in and announce that it had all been very funny and now he could go home, and they hoped he'd learned his lesson about gossiping behind the government's back. He was a good sport. He could take a joke.

They'd taken his chains off at a whistle stop somewhere in West Mauraine. He'd been allowed to use the station lavatory, but not to buy a candied apple from the vendor on the platform. Not that he had any money. Or bootlaces, pen, pocketknife, etcetera; he supposed they'd take his clothes when he got to prison. Thinking about this made him increasingly fond of the yellow shirt and brown corduroy bags he'd been arrested in. He'd been wearing them for months now, while awaiting trial, and they'd been a bit ratty to begin with, so there wasn't much left of them. But now they were just about all that remained of the world he belonged in. His clothes, and his glasses -- If they were going take my glasses they would have done it already, wouldn't they?

Ashleigh leaned against the swaying wall of the prison car, peering out the tiny slatted window, picking at the scabs the cold-iron manacles had left on his wrists. There was desert outside. It had been interesting to see how the slushy end-of-winter snow of Eskard had given up on the way west. Not gradually as he'd imagined, but all at once, so that he would have missed it if he'd had anything better to do. For instance, a bloody crayon to write with -- how could you kill yourself with a pen, and ought he to be worried that they'd thought he'd want to?

He was going to be eaten alive in prison. He'd realized that shortly after the shock of not being executed had worn off. He was pale, skinny, freckled, redheaded, and myopic; he was certain to learn new definitions of pain, fear, and degradation. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He could only try to distract himself from worrying.

A sort of shack thing flashed by, and he saw a farmhouse farther off, skimming along between the stationary mountains and the speeding scrub. A plume of smoke rose from an intermediately distant valley beyond the farm, growing closer as acres of dry plow-furrows slipped by. Ashleigh could discern a sharp new smell under the reek of the engine and the desert's alien scent. Something chemical. A city; or at least a giant refinery. He'd heard that most of the iron and coal and so forth for the Commonwealth's military machine was produced out here. He scrubbed ar his glasses with a filthy shirttail and peered hard at the plume of pollution as it grew closer. He sincerely hoped this wasn't his destination.

When the train stopped at a roofless platform surrounded by grayish adobe shacks, his heart sank. He told himself they were just taking on fuel and water, but it had only been four hours since the last stop. Then one of his white-uniformed guards came and banged on the compartment's iron door to get his attention, and he knew: he was being sent to wheeze out his last months in slavery at some asbestos mine or something. He wondered whether, if he made a break for it, they'd just shoot him.

"Back on the bench, Trine," the guard said. "Hands on your head."

Ashleigh did as he was told. The man came in with his gun trained, as if his slight, bespectacled prisoner might perform some amazing feat of derring-do and wrest the weapon from him. He was followed by another, who carried the hated manacles.

"Oh, no," Ashleigh groaned. "Do we have to?"

Ignoring him, the man fastened the chains on Ashleigh's wrists. As he stepped away, he said, "You better keep that big mouth of yours shut from now on. We're taking on a couple of real baddies. They won't be nice to you like we are."

"If I'm not a real baddie," Ashleigh muttered, "why am I here?" Naturally he got no reply. The Watchmen just slammed the door, leaving him to scratch his wrists and remind himself that none of this was actually happening.

The engine sat on the tracks, humming to itself, for a long time. His watch was another of those things he didn't have, but it was long enough for the sun to get behind a ridge of furrowed hills a couple miles west of the train. The desert, which had been all rust and mustard before, went suddenly purple. The warmth of the day was instantly gone. Some kind of demented dog started howling somewhere nearby.

A clang of footsteps on the metal connector-thing outside his moveable cell made his heart jump with apprehension. The 'real baddies' coming aboard, no doubt. A Watchman stepped in first, establishing a field of fire throughout the tiny room. Then a big, saggy pig of a clearly nasty man, who glared at Ashleigh with a sort of hateful avarice, obviously hoping he'd get a chance to do some violence as soon as the guards were out of his hair. He had to be threatened before he'd take his seat against the opposite wall.

Ashleigh was watching pig-man as carefully as someone allergic to wasps watches a buzzing blot on the windowpane, so he was turned away from the door, but he heard a third set of footsteps enter. Then an amazing voice spoke -- a young baritone, sandy and smooth at once, with a strong Iavaian drawl, lazy as a wolf gnawing a bone.

"No, I wanna sit over there," the voice said. "I don't wanna sit by Burdock, I been sitting by him for fuckin' weeks, it's real stale."

There was a sound Ashleigh had learned to recognize, the thud of a rifle butt into someone's kidneys. The inevitable grunt followed, and then something that sounded suspiciously like a fragment of a laugh. Ashleigh ripped his gaze from the evil stare of the man across from him, to watch as the possessor of this razor-blades-in-the-candy voice was shoved into the car.

This was the tallest human being Ashleigh had ever seen, and the most beautiful, and the most frightening. His hands were chained at his belt. As a sour-faced Watchman fastened the back of that belt to a ring behind the bench, the tall boy gave Ashleigh a cool half-smile and a small nod. Ashleigh tried to nod back like a normal person, while reaction ran through him from eyes to loins like boiling honey.

The Iavaian could not have been much older than Ashleigh's eighteen years, might even have been younger, but he looked as if he'd been through several wars and was eager for another one. He had the angular features typical of his race, the brown skin and black hair, but his eyes were a dusty, yellowed green, like the sky before a bad storm. Pale scars streaked his face: divided one of his sharply angled brows, nicked the bridge of his nose, drew dashes along one cheekbone. His hair was matted into waist-length ropes. What shredded clothing was left on him was so caked with mud and dust and what looked like dried blood that it was impossible to tell what color it had been. Beneath the dirt, his arms were scrawled with more scars and spiky red-and-black tattoos. His long legs made the low bench awkward for him, and he had to sit sideways to keep his elbows out of pig-man's way. His skinned-knuckled hands were huge. He was lean and menacing as a wild dog, and no matter how he hunched on the bench his presence crowded the jail car until it was hard to breathe in there.

The car gave a lurch, and the engine's vibration changed pitch. The guards had left long ago, but Ashleigh, busy staring, hadn't noticed. Even the movement of the train only registered peripherally. The Iavaian stared back patiently while Ashleigh gawked at his face, his corded forearms, his long throat, his many scars...

"You done yet?"

Ashleigh felt his face go hot, and jerked his gaze away. "Sorry," he muttered.

"Not much else to look at," the Iavaian said forgivingly. "I mean, there's the floor, and Burdock's ugly mug."

"Hey." Pig-man spoke for the first time, in a high, nasal voice that didn't fit his exterior and perhaps explained his attitude. "I about had it with you, boy."

The scarred boy grinned at pig-man, teeth crooked but perfectly white. "You think you're pretty?"

"Shut up. I don't gotta take shit from you no more." He turned his scowl on Ashleigh. "Quit staring, you pansy."

"I wasn't."

"You calling me a liar? You saying I lied?"

"No, of course --"

"Then quit fucking staring."

"I -- dear god, I'm back in grammar school."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Pig-man, Burdock, stood up. Ashleigh tried hard not to cringe back against the wall. He was wondering, despairingly, whether there was any incentive for a man already on his way to prison not to beat him to death right there in the jail car, when Burdock took one step and went sprawling on the floor.

The Iavaian reeled in a mile-long leg and smiled. "Means grow up," he clarified.

Burdock began to get up, turning, clearly about to launch in the Iavaian's direction. He never made it past the first half-syllable of his retort. The Iavaian kicked him under the chin, hard enough to snap his head back and send him over to smack the back of his skull against Ashleigh's bench with a sickening thump.

Ashleigh edged away from the man's still bulk, and back from the Iavaian who'd downed him while still chained to the far wall. A small bubble of blood appeared at the corner of Burdock's mouth and commenced growing and popping with every rattling breath.

"Quit cringing. I ain't gonna hurt you. Just saved your ass, didn't I?"

"Yes... thank you."

"You should probably kill him. I would, if I wasn't locked down." He sounded as if he meant it.

Ashleigh looked to him in horror. "Kill him?"

"If where they're taking us is anything like normal prison, he'll kill you later if you don't get rid of him now."

"I can't do that!"

"Sure you can. Step on his neck. Easy."

"That's not what I mean."

"Oh. Scruples." The Iavaian shrugged. "Probably want to get rid of those pretty quick here."

Ashleigh decided not to ask, after all, what the boy's name was, or why he was chained to the bench. Carefully training his eyes on the small square of window that glowed above the other's head, he made himself very still.

This isn't happening, he told himself. It isn't real. I'm not here.

"Trine. Wake up, boy. What the hell did you do?"

Ashleigh pried his eyes open, wincing in the glare of a Watchman's hissing gas lantern. Sleeping with his head against the compartment's vibrating wall had given him a headache. The wall wasn't vibrating now, though. They'd shut the engine off. They had arrived.

All at once, he came awake and sat up, half panicked and none too coherent.

"Whoa," said a guard in a different uniform, a tan one. "Easy, kid. Man asked you a question." With a jerk of his head he indicated the slumped form of Burdock, still blowing bubbles.

Across the car, the Iavaian chuckled. "That Trine, he's a madman. I'm scared."

"Shut it, freak," the Watchman spat.

Ashleigh opened his mouth to explain, but the Iavaian was looking at him, expectant, scar-bisected eyebrow slightly raised, and he changed his mind. "He had some kind of fit," he said instead. "He was banging around, and then he fell down."

"Huh." This news seemed to surprise no one. "All right. Come on out, kid. Watch the step there."

Feeling a thousand years old, Ashleigh climbed out into the desert night.

It felt like a dream, because it was too real. He was raw, a bunch of naked nerves and infant emotion. The chill breeze with its freight of unfamiliar smells overwhelmed him. The sounds of strange insects hurt him.

They had stopped at a platform of bare concrete, roofed with corrugated steel. It was lit with a painful profusion of lamps. There were no walls. Two white-uniformed sentries watched the distance, too disciplined even to move their eyes. Ashleigh was marched down a set of steps and onto a gravel road, which led toward a small constellation of lamps. Overhead, the stars were huge. There were too many of them. He felt as if he might fall into them. Between the stars and the lamps there was a huge square blackness where something blotted out the sky.

At first he thought it was a building. A few steps later, he realized he'd misjudged the scale by several orders of magnitude. It was a mountain. A flat-topped mountain that could have swallowed his home town of Ladygate with room to spare for a couple of suburbs if you stacked them. Stopped at a gate in a wire fence, half-hearing his guards exchanging formalities with the heavily-armed men inside, he saw his new home and wanted to cry. It was built into the base of the mountain. It had no windows at all.

They were let through the gate. Ashleigh took a last look at the stars, said goodbye to fresh air, and walked into prison.

There was a series of checkpoints with metal gates, and then a bare white room where he was made to sit on a bench. There his escort left him.

"Bye," Ashleigh said forlornly.

One of them turned at the door. "Keep your head down and your mouth shut and you'll be all right," he advised. He didn't sound as if he believed it.

This room couldn't be his cell, because it had doors at either end. He wasn't waiting long before the second door opened, and a man in a tan uniform motioned for him to come through. In the room beyond was a man with a clipboard, and neither instruction man nor clipboard man were armed. There were, however, a couple of slots up near the ceiling. Maybe the guns were behind them. Besides the men, this room had another bench, a couple of big bins, an alcove with a drain in the floor, and a long row of shelves of folded blue-gray clothing.

"Hands," said the first guard. Ashleigh offered them, and his manacles were taken off and tossed in a bin. "Clothes." Shivering naked, he said farewell as his friendly clothes went into another bin. "Put your glasses on the bench. You can get them later. Step into the shower."

Squinting now as well as shivering, he went into the alcove, the floor of which was slimy with what he hoped was soap. Suddenly he was deluged with freezing water. His startled squawk made the guards laugh. Probably the high point of their day, he thought sourly, dumping cold water on people.

"There's a cake of soap behind you. Make sure you work it thoroughly into your scalp and all body hair."

The soap was a poisonous yellow and smelled like tar. He supposed it killed lice. He also guessed that there was no point explaining that he'd never had lice in his life, so he rubbed the nasty stuff into his scalp and armpits and groin, wincing as the skin began to itch.

"Good. Now make sure you rinse off all of it."

Another icy deluge was enough to rinse everything but his hair; the thick curls trapped the soap, and his scalp still itched. Was, in fact, beginning to sting. "May I have a little more water?" he begged. "Please?"

The guards looked at each other and shrugged. Clipboard man pulled a little handle -- which he must have been doing before -- and Ashleigh was allowed to finish rinsing his hair.

While Ashleigh dripped and shivered, instruction man produced a tape measure. "Stand there. Arms and legs apart."

Ashleigh tried a joke, to see what would happen. "A summer ensemble in fawn linen, if you please, and none of those garish brass buttons this time."

This got a wry quirk from clipboard man, who spoke for the first time: "Sure, we've never heard that one before." Then he commenced writing as instruction man called out Ashleigh's measurements. He was far more thorough than Ashleigh thought necessary, considering that the clothing he could see in the shelves was rather formless. It was as if he actually were being fitted for a suit. They even measured his neck and wrists, the length of his hands and the circumference of his head.

"Um. Excuse me," he said when they were finally done. "Why all the measuring?"

"This is a research facility," clipboard answered. "We study you fellows here."

"What, criminals?"

"Talents." Instruction man handed Ashleigh a stack of blue cotton cloth, with his glasses perched on top. "Through there." On cue, another door opened.

A long series of rooms ensued. Ashleigh was weighed, prodded, gagged with a stick, had his kidneys and throat and testicles kneaded, his eyes and ears peered into, was stared at through colored lenses and exposed to magnets. Bizarre though it all was, after a while he found himself losing interest. He was tired. He was hungry and cold. He wanted to put his ugly new clothes on and go to sleep in a nice, safe cell.

At last he got his wish. The series of humiliations came to an end and he was allowed to dress -- drawstring pants and a sort of peasant blouse which, despite the measuring, didn't fit at all well -- and to put his glasses on. He'd had them off so long that resuming them made his head hurt.

A final clipboard man checked the spelling of his name, then called some armed men to take him into a maze of stairs and tunnels carved out of honey-colored stone. At last, past yet another metal gate, they came out into a cavernous space that echoed with snoring and smelled like despair. Yellowish lamps provided just enough illumination for Ashleigh to see a broad central corridor lined with metal gates, and steps leading up to a second tier of gates set back from the first. Each gate on the ground floor revealed a cell with two sleeping occupants; the ones on the upper right level seemed mostly vacant.

"I'm going to hate it here," he mumbled.

"Trine. 2-E. Up the stairs, kid."

Dragging himself up the steps, he was let into a cell that was, blessedly, empty.

"Home sweet home," the guard told him, and the gate clanged shut.

Too tired to even pace out the size of his cell, Ashleigh picked the left-hand bunk, wrapped himself in its scratchy but mercifully clean blanket, and went to sleep.

A clang of metal woke him. He fumbled for his glasses, dizzy with fatigue. Morning already? It was still dark, but maybe it was always dark here.

No, the air was still full of snoring. The guard was talking to someone right outside Ashleigh's cell. "I heard about you, you son of a bitch. You just give me an excuse to shoot you."

The gravel-and-honey voice from the train replied. "Those that ask don't get. All right if I sleep now?"

The cell door opened; a dark form came in; the bars clanged shut. Ashleigh found his specs and rammed them onto his face, bringing the spidery shape of his cellmate into focus. The Iavaian bounced on the edge of his bunk a few times, making it creak, then sprawled out on it. His feet hung off the end. He rolled his head toward Ashleigh to show him a glint of teeth.

"Trine," he said. "How about that. We're alphabet buddies." He flopped out a long arm, and after an awkward hesitation Ashleigh understood and mirrored the gesture. The Iavaian's hand engulfed his. "Trevarde. Kieran Trevarde."

"Ashleigh Trine."

Trevarde continued to hold his hand. "You seem like a smart kid. You smart?"

"I guess so."

"So you recognize I could squash you like a bug, right?"

Ashleigh didn't like where this was going. "I can see that."

"All right. You don't give me any attitude, Ash, we'll get along just fine." Trevarde finally let go. He put his arms behind his head and closed his eyes, apparently at ease.

Burrowing back into his blanket, Ashleigh considered this new development. On the whole, he concluded, it was disastrous. Trevarde was apparently extremely dangerous, from the way the guards behaved. Ashleigh was inclined to agree with them. And Trevarde's undeniable charisma added an extra danger, for he was sure that if the tall Iavaian guessed that Ashleigh was attracted to him, an ass-kicking would be a best-case scenario.

The advice everyone kept giving him was right. Head down, mouth shut. Just keep repeating: This isn't happening. This isn't happening.