Hungover as fuck, that's how it's going.

Eadmund of Cold Comfort has just woken up. He is sitting in the dirt, and looking at the hateful blasphemy in the sky, and thinking that thought that only blackout drunks and particularly irresponsible Excrucians can have: did I do that?

Okay, Eddin, let's backtrack. Reconstruct. What happened, and why is there now a hateful blasphemy in the sky of this otherwise inoffensive world?

This would be easier if he didn't have a blinding headache. He starts trudging towards a coastal village, on the assumption they'll have potable water somewhere.

He was in the throes of Infection. Never a good start. Things start getting very psychedelic when he's in an Infection state; temptations that he can't even really perceive, things he doesn't know he wants. He's a walking time bomb when it gets that bad.

He... went traveling, through the void. He landed in... a seraglio? It seemed like a seraglio. He talked to a nice girl... a nice boy? A lot of people look like boys when he's in Infection. A nice person, wearing too few clothes, who was very worried for him. Somebody else was saying He wouldn't hurt a child, but the person wasn't convinced, said they'd seen Him do worse.

He doesn't really remember from there, but he suspects he was tempted into drastic action. Probably against whoever He was.

Who explodes when they die, he thinks, hypocritically.

The coastal village approaches. He squares his shoulders and tries to squint less. (It draws attention to where his eyes aren't.)

The village is very busy. People seem to be packing up all their stuff and loading it into little fishing boats. There are at least five arguments going on at once. A sample:

"...don't even know if it'll be any better."

"Well if it isn't, we can always turn back. Meanwhile, do you want to live like this," backwards gesture at haunted horizon, "if there might be somewhere better out there?"

"Well, no, but..."

"I heard they're trying to evacuate all of Southport."

"Sucks to be all of Southport, then."

"How will there ever be room for us?"

"Plenty of places with room for us won't have room for all of Southport. And, you know. We are bringing help."

"...the tree."

"Trying not to think about the tree, thanks."

"It's hard not to!"

"The sea'll steer us right. Nobody's turning into a tree on her watch."

...yeah that makes sense. As a thing to do.

He looks for someone who looks non-panicked and, ideally, maternal-looking enough to be a lost child at.

(He does not recall, at this time, that he is dressed in his princely raiment and has hoarfrost collecting in his hair. Or that there is a sword belted at his waist. It is difficult to remember these things, in the same way that it is difficult to remember that one is breathing, or blinking, or committing cellular respiration.)

There are variously maternal figures available, largely not panicked, including one whose actual ten-year-old son seems to be helping her bring water to the people doing the heaviest lifting—

—aaaand he has been intercepted by an old woman, complete with walking stick and faded blue shawl, who gently asks him, "Where'd you come from, then?"

"I don't know," he says, not inaccurately, and "My head hurts," entirely truthfully.

"That so? Well, you've come at a busy time, but you're welcome to sit in my hut and have a drink of water." She gestures to one of the nicer available huts.

He goes to sit in the nice hut. (Everything is actually kind of overwhelming right now, he's not entirely acting a part.)

The old woman lags behind by a minute or so, but when she shows up she has a cup of fresh cold water for him.

Oh it's cold. He'd be worried this was a Temptation, if it weren't for how he literally just exploded in a cloud of bad decisions. He drinks gratefully. It helps with the headache, probably on a more or less psychosomatic level.

"Do you know..." He gestures vaguely at the blasphemy behind him.

It's not so bad from inside the hut. Like, still bad, but less insistent about it.

"No more than anybody else does," she says. "That's where Skygarden used to be, or at any rate where we think it was. Now instead of Skygarden there's That. Going to be a civil war or two about it, I reckon." She says this almost like she's remarking on the weather, but there's an edge of tiredness in her tone, or maybe just the anticipation of future tiredness.

"...I'm sorry. What was Skygarden?"

"Flying city. Capital of the world. Home of the immortal Emperor. You know," she says, raising her eyebrows slightly. "Except it seems that you don't."

"...I'm not going to lie," he says sullenly. "I'm too tired and sad to lie.* No, I don't know what Skygarden was, or who the Emperor was. I mean, I think I remember the Emperor, a little. He was tall. And... ugh, I don't remember. He looked evil. But I don't know if he was or if I was just..."

He's crying, a little bit. He hates crying, it makes people look for his eyes.

*And he's not Iolithae, so it doesn't just kind of happen regardless.

If she's looking for his eyes, she's not remarking on what she finds there.

"I don't know if I'd call the Emperor evil. He certainly isn't kind. Dangerous, yes, he's dangerous. But if That," she nods at the wall behind which It distantly hovers, "had happened anywhere else, I'd have gone to him about it and expected him to help."

"I..."

He blows his nose on his sleeve. His hand comes back down to the table, the sleeve pristine.

"I'm sorry," he says again. "I wasn't - I wasn't thinking right, and he was hurting people... and it shouldn't have happened like that, anyway. Killing someone shouldn't do that. It's always bad to kill people but it's usually morally bad, you know?"

Despite the apparent resilience of his sleeve, she passes him a handkerchief. It's old and worn and not especially fancy but it functions for its intended purpose.

"Well. He's the Emperor," she says. "Wouldn't have expected anything less." She considers. "All right, the fact that you can't sit where it shines without feeling it is a surprise. But if you'd said to me last week, 'if the Emperor ever manages to die, the city where it happened will be on fire for a hundred years'—that, I would've believed." She considers further. "Not sure if I would've believed the part where if you stray too close you turn into the cursedest tree I've ever seen."

"People shouldn't explode when they die," Eadmund mumbles, scrunching the handkerchief between his hands. "It's a terrible deterrent because nobody knows it'll happen until it does, at which point you're dead."

"I suppose," she says. "I wouldn't have thought of it that way. Just seems that if you do something as impossible as kill the Emperor, something uncanny and dreadful probably happens."

"I do impossible things all the time! Almost none of them have been this terrible!"

"...if you do them all the time, how do you mean they're impossible?"

"...well, they should be impossible. They can't be done, by the rules under which reality operates. But I don't follow the rules. Anything that is, I can cut. It doesn't matter if it's a mountain, or sunlight, or a mother's love, or what. I can cut it. That doesn't mean it's not impossible to cut sunlight. It just means I can do it. You know?"

"...I think," she says slowly, "that you might... come from a place where it is normal to do impossible things. And have ended up in one where it isn't."

"I guess that makes sense. And... if I'm far enough away from home that doing impossible things does... that..."

When he trails off, she waits to see if he'll elaborate.

"Maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe I need to leave before this place realizes that me existing is impossible. Or before I stop thinking straight again."

"Well, we don't have another Emperor lying around, so at least you can't make the same mistake twice. But if you can leave, I might recommend it, all the same. This world's like to be no place for a child, the next little while."

"...'m not a child," Eadmund says, in the exact tone of voice used by twelve-year-olds the world over.

She shrugs. "It'll be no place for anybody, but the rest of us are stuck with it."

There's not much he can say to that.

Except "Sorry," again, and walk out into the sunlight, and the un-light, and then... walk away.

There's a Waylet a few miles inland. He invokes Maugrim, once he's out of sight, and hops on his back, and rides the great black wolf to that place where the world's skin is a little thinner, and he cuts his way through to the other side.

Then he walks the Ways, and walks away from another world he's ruined.

Eight years have passed. Eadmund hasn't really been keeping track. He's older and wiser, though it isn't necessarily obvious to look at him. Or to talk to him. Or, really, in any respect.

He knows more about the Ways, and usually he goes where he intends to go. But this is not universally true. Sometimes he gets turned about, and comes out somewhere he doesn't know.

...or somewhere he does. Huh. He remembers this floating island being significantly more cursed?

It's a remarkably un-cursed floating island, really, though it's also... smaller... than it was before he happened to it. And quieter. Less busy. More of a somber mood.

The Horrible Tree is still there, but someone has remodeled it into something green and living and fantastically beautiful, its spreading branches laden with sunset-coloured flowers the size of cities. One of the airships coming in to land at the Skygarden docks seems to have sails made of its enormous leaves.

He walks through the streets. Beholds the tree.

Is there still a palace complex in the middle of the island. He remembers that the palace was beautiful.

The palace has been completely overhauled in design, but it's just as beautiful as the last version, perhaps even more. Its wings stretch out into the city like a glorious sunburst, open and airy and full of light, and in the center of it all a rocky hill emerges, ringed by a spiral path leading up to a shining white tower, which—

—he's on the moon now.

"Fancy seeing you again."

It's a decently pleasant bit of moon. There's air. Nice view of the planet hanging in the sky. The Emperor is gazing expectantly at him.

"Well I'm not killing you again," he says, a bit befuddled. "Look how it went last time."

"We didn't exactly have a lengthy conversation last time you were here. Not much time to get a sense of who you are as a person and what you were after."

"You wouldn't have gotten one. I was barely conscious." He pauses. "...I didn't actually get much idea who you were, either. Certainly not enough to justify killing you. So... sorry."

"Mm. If it'd been just me you arguably wouldn't have been wrong; I'm not that ticked off about it. The mess that was made of my empire while I was out, now, that's trickier to forgive. War's a thing I'd prided myself on getting rid of, before."

"I certainly don't know you well enough to apologize competently for the political consequences of assassinating you. Rest assured that I did not consider them beforehand."

"Sure. So, why're you back?"

"It is difficult to navigate the interminable void, and places you've been before have a metacausal gravity that can pull you off-course. ...not that I was aiming anywhere in particular, admittedly."

"So... you wander the spaces between worlds at random, getting high and killing people? Do you... need... help?"

"I wasn't high. I - this is going to be complicated to explain. But I guess you do deserve a proper explanation."

Deep breath. "When I was nine years old, I took candy from a stranger. I knew I shouldn't, but I'd never got a very clear picture of why I shouldn't. It was drugged. She took me to her house and... hurt me. Kept me there for a while. Kept hurting me. The police came, eventually, and she went to jail, and I went home. But... nothing was right, anymore. I didn't feel like a person. Home didn't feel like home. The world was wrong. It shouldn't have happened, because a nice lady giving you sweets shouldn't be able to hurt you like that.

"After that, it seemed like whenever I did something I knew I shouldn't, it went badly. Worse than you'd expect. I'd steal a pie and puke for days. I'd make fun of a girl's braids and her brother would break my arm. And I couldn't stop doing things I shouldn't. It just got worse and worse. And then I drank some liquor out of my parents' cabinet, thinking it'd make me numb and make it all easier to take, and instead I passed out and choked on my own vomit and I died.

"I remember dying, and thinking, at least it was over. And I wondered if I'd go to Heaven, even though it didn't seem very likely. And I thought, even Hell couldn't be worse.

"And my soul went down. And Hell tried to catch me, but my soul slipped past it, past everything, past the roots of the world tree and the burning wall that guards it. Into the nothingness. And it was just... dark. And I felt myself dissolving.

"And I was furious, suddenly. I was mad at the woman who'd hurt me and I was mad at the world for letting her. I was mad at myself for not knowing better and I was mad at everyone else for not teaching me better. I hated everyone. I hated everything. I hated the world, and I realized that the world had hated me, that everything that happened to me was because I was wrong, I was broken - and it made me so mad that I knew, all of a sudden, that I couldn't die. Couldn't let the world win. I'd kill it first.

"Um. To elide rather a lot of further exposition, I did try to kill the world. But eventually I just... got tired of it. Threw down my sword, all that. And I went looking for something else that would make my existence make sense. But when I stopped trying to kill the world, I realized that I hadn't actually stopped having my trouble with... temptation. It still went badly for me, when I did things I knew I shouldn't. And it got worse over time, until it was dangerous for me to do things I wanted even when they weren't bad. And if I went long enough, I started to have trouble telling what I wanted. And eventually, something I wanted would kill me, and the cycle would reset.

"When I arrived in your world, I was so deep in that state that I barely knew what was happening around me. I was surrounded by your slaves. One of them was saying you wouldn't hurt a child, another of them said they'd seen you do worse. And I wanted to kill you, because... I guess because you'd hurt people. Not that I haven't hurt people."

He sits on the ground, looking miserable. "So I killed you. And that killed me. And I woke up a few hours later on the surface. With a headache. I still remember the headache."

"Um," he says. "So. To start with. I don't think... the world... is a thing that can hate, or win or lose? At any rate I think this one isn't. Is yours?"

"Yes. Or at least everything that makes up the world is, even if there isn't one big spirit at the top of the whole coalition - but, yes, in my experience of where I'm from anything can hate you. I've met a woman dying of Kittens. Not specific kittens, just... the concept."

"...that doesn't happen, here. That is not... a thing that makes sense to have happen. I also don't think I really understand about heaven or hell. When people die here they just, sort of, are dead, and aren't there anymore, because that's what being dead is."

"I didn't have accurate information about Heaven or Hell, but the idea is that there's good place you can go when you die, where you're happy forever, and a bad place, where demons torment you. It's substantially more complex than that, but the gist turned out to be accurate."

"And the... part where... you were so mad about dying that instead you didn't... that's also the sort of thing that happens, in your world that can have feelings?"

Handwiggle. "Also more complicated. Almost no one can do that. Explaining why it happened would involve an amount of philosophy that makes me physically nauseous but can be summed up as it happened to me because it was always going to happen to me. Out of the trillions of humans and similar people who have ever died... what is it, three thousand? Have ended up like me."

"Right, but it happens at all. It's the sort of thing that can happen. Thousands of times, even. As opposed to being insane and not how anything works."

"Yes. It is arguably still insane."

"I had a lot of other questions I can't remember but I think the important one is—you just keep doing this? Getting more and more fucked up until something breaks and you start all over again?"

"...yeah. I guess at some point I might... let it go... but."

"I don't want to die."

"What if someone brought you back to life?"

"...it might work. It might just start the cycle over. I might just... dissolve into the void so there was nothing left of me, not even enough to bring back."

"Why???"

"I don't know! Nobody's ever brought back a dead Excrucian! I know the rules are different here but that doesn't give me an advantage in figuring out which set applies!"

Despite not strictly needing to breathe, Eadmund is clearly hyperventilating.

"...so, I don't usually tell people this, but I can raise the dead. Not because there's anything left of them. There isn't. But they used to be real and alive, and that's—enough by itself, to reach back into the past and find the... memory, if you like, though the world doesn't really remember things... of who they were and what they were like, and create them again from scratch. It takes a while, though, because building a whole person from scratch is a pretty big job."

Eadmund nods. Or possibly just trembles in a coincidentally similar way. He's doing a lot of trembling.

"...are... you okay?"

He starts crying by way of response.

Um...???

"Sorry," he says, through the tears and general effluvia. "Um. I'm usually more. Functional. Than this."

He wipes his face partway clean with his sleeve. "You -" He makes a face, then blows his nose, also into his sleeve, and continues. "You make a compelling case. It's just... really scary. I've been holding on, making myself keep existing, making myself keep hurting, for... a while. Because I can't keep going if I flinch. And you want me to let go."

"There's no being sure about this. I only know what I know and you clearly come from an insane place with very different rules than I'm used to. But—I don't know. If the problem is being dead, or half dead or whatever, seems to me the obvious solution is to make you be alive. I don't even know that I'd have to ask you to let go first, though I suppose it would be very weird, watching me make another of you."

"...I don't know if that would be worse but it wouldn't be better."

"Fair enough."

"It would sort of... highlight how I'd be killing myself to let somebody who looks like me keep existing without being some of the important things that I am. Most of which are bad but some of which aren't."

"I don't... usually think of bringing someone back to life as killing them?"

"Well, you said yourself that they're usually dead dead, not running around having experiences. A lot of my experiences are about being dead. And, I don't want to confuse the point: most of them suck. But I'm pretty sure that a living person who was me couldn't see Ninuan, not properly. A living person who was me might not be able to understand Ninuan. ...Ninuan is the kingdom that doesn't exist that was destroyed before reality started existing, where I live when I've recently died. I am led to believe this is hard for living persons to wrap their heads around."

"... that's not... how... those words... normally work? A lot of things about you are not how things normally work. I almost begin to wonder if what you need is... something that's as strange to you as you are to me. Something where you can take a turn saying 'that's not how that normally works!' but then the way it works is also a solution to your problems. Either that or I need to figure out a lot of things that I have no idea how to figure out about bringing back the dead."

"...and while I'm looking, I might end up destroying another civilization. While stumbling around realities, getting high and killing people."

He shrinks in on himself.

"I don't think getting more of what I want is worth that."

He shrugs. "I'm not going to tell you what you should do with your life; it's up to you to figure that out. I'll bring you back if you want, though. And if you ask again in a decade or two I'll help you look for something weird enough to solve your problems for you. I shouldn't try any sooner than that, people won't take well to me being gone again."

"I'll hold you to that, you know."

And Eadmund lets go. It doesn't actually look like much. One moment he's there; then, he isn't. If they were planetside, there'd be a pop as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum. But they're on the moon. So he's just... gone.

Well. Seems clear enough, all things considered.

He makes sure he's seen around the palace for a little while, and then he takes off from the edge of Skygarden and goes for a long flight, chasing the stranger who killed him.

It's not hard to find the person he's looking for; it's harder than he expected to get a proper grip, to patiently redirect the confused tangle of magic and memory that keeps falling to pieces in his metaphorical hands. He's very good at this, though. That he's the best in the world goes without saying because he's the only person who can do it at all, but he is, additionally, very good.

Not much more than a day has passed when Eadmund finds himself standing in a cool breeze under warm sun, a soft blanket settling around his shoulders.

"I didn't have time to warn you that resurrection is a little inconvenient in the clothes department," says the Emperor, standing several feet away. "I tried to make you something like what you were wearing before but I'm not sure I got it right, it was an unfamiliar style and I didn't see it for very long."

The outfit in question is, for some reason, sitting neatly folded on a stout little table which is in fact not a table at all but a living flower with silver-grey petals. He's done a decent job matching the look, though it's not an identical copy by any means. The part he reproduced most accurately is the sword, which is lying next to the stack of folded clothing.

Eadmund regains consciousness, standing in a cool breeze under warm sun.

Edmund opens his eyes.

He looks at the regalia of the Traitor-King of Cold Comfort, and hears the words that the Emperor is saying, which sound very distant. He reaches out, grips the hilt of his

of the sword. He gives it an experimental swing. It's heavy - instead of the whispering swish he's used to, it carves the air like thick jelly.

He lets it go, and it clatters down. He listens for her. Jadis.

Nothing. He tries Maugrim. The raven. A handful of other courtiers, though he knows they won't answer.

"Thank you," he says. "I sincerely do mean that."

"You're welcome."

"I... will come back," he adds. "In a decade or two. To ask that you do what you promised. I'm alive, now, and that's better, but I lost a lot. ...also I can't walk the ways of Ninuan anymore, so I am possibly homeless."

"Lots of people are homeless these days. We're working on it. I can drop you off at the palace and they'll find you somewhere to be, or you can point at a map if you'd rather be somewhere else."

"Sounds good. If there's... wait, I'm just a prepubescent human right now, I definitely can't help with housing efforts. Unless you work out how to travel between worlds yourself, and need my advice on where to find endless forests or vast fruited plains or elementals who love building cities more than anything else. Then I guess I can help, and you should let me know."

"I'm decently good at building cities myself. But I appreciate the offer."

"You do build them very nicely."

Edmund looks at the regalia. "...I don't actually want to wear his clothes, not while he's gone. Could I get... whatever seems low-effort for you? Before you drop me off at the palace?"

"Sure, no problem." A second table-flower sprouts next to the first; when its blue-grey petals unfurl, there's a second outfit neatly folded inside, in a more understated local style.

"Thanks," Edmund says. He steps forward and gets dressed. "Ready when you are."

He's already spinning up a portal.

"Remember to eat food, and pee, and stuff," he advises awkwardly as he moves toward it. "Because you're alive now. And I don't mind if you tell people the truth about who you are and how you got here, but they might be weird about it. I guess try not to specifically tell people I can bring back the dead, but it'll just be really inconvenient if you do, it's not the kind of problem that people die over. Mostly."

"...oh God, I'm going to be able to eat food. And it'll hardly ever be poisoned. I won't tell anybody you brought me back, just that you fixed me."

"Sounds good to me."

He steps through the portal. On the other side is a corridor, prettier than a corridor has any right to be, with a vaulted ceiling and unnecessarily ornate stonework. But it's not the glitz of a place built to impress: someone made this hallway beautiful because they love beauty.

The Emperor leads him along the hall until a right turn and an open arch deposit them in a big office staffed by a couple of stressed-looking teenagers. "Hey," he says. "This kid needs somewhere to stay, can you take care of it?"

The one behind the desk rakes her hair back from her face with one hand and summons a tired smile; the one interrupted in the middle of pacing the floor turns on his heel to angle closer, though he seems reluctant to walk directly toward the Emperor. "Yeah—yeah, no problem," he says, giving Eadmund an appraising look. "What's your name?"

"...Ed," he decides.

Then he turns to Solekaran. "Are you going to put out more fires? And if so, can I hug you first?"

"Probably. And sure."

Hug. Solekaran is atrociously tall and Ed is fairly short even for his physical age, so he's mostly getting an armful of waist.

"Sorry for killing you," he says, somewhat muffled. "Thanks for fixing me anyway."

Hug. "It seemed like what the situation called for."

Both of the youthful yet harried administrative staff in the room look like they have So Many Questions but neither of them is moving to try to ask any. The Emperor opens a portal next to him and steps through it with a little wave.

Ed turns to the harried youths. "Right! Um. I know he said to find me a house but can I also request a job? Are there positions open in your institution? My resumé is... patchy... but I do have administrative experience, mostly military, and I think a good work ethic covers many sins. And I like your boss."

"... he's not our boss," says the girl at the desk. "I mean. Technically. Very technically. But if you can tolerate the risk of running into him that puts you ahead of most people who might work here. Do you, uh... so..."

"You look like you're twelve," the other fellow cuts in helpfully. "Are you meaningfully twelve, or is one of the weird things going on with you 'looks like he's twelve but is actually an ageless force of nature like someone else I could mention'?"

"Uh. I was an ageless... kind of the opposite of a force of nature but yeah, 'looked like' rather than 'was' twelve. But now I'm slightly more an actual twelve-year-old. I'm still much smarter and more experienced than a normal kid but I may have other twelve-year-old disadvantages, like not being able to reach high shelves."

He thinks about it. "Actually my strange and terrible powers did not really help me with shelves. I just didn't interact with them much."

"Sure. Well, it's not like we're in much position to turn down the help," says the girl at the desk. "The pay is pretty bad but the work sure keeps you busy. If you don't like being responsible for other people's lives, you should probably stay home."

"If you keep talking us up like that, everyone will want to join," says the other guy, rolling his eyes.

"I'd rather scare them off early than have them just stop showing up to work one day because they couldn't take it. —we should stop bickering and find Ed somewhere to live. Ed, south or east? South is closer to the docks and has a better view of the tree; east has prettier gardens and a better view of the sunrise. There is also an orphanage but I'm going to guess you'd rather have your own house."

"East," Ed says immediately. "...I've been responsible for other people's lives for a long time. Almost exclusively making them worse. It might be a nice change."

"East it is—Vosce, get me the—"

Vosce is already halfway across the room, pulling a thick ledger off a shelf and hauling it back to the desk so the girl can flip it open and page through it.

"Do you want to see your house before you decide which one, or should I just give you the first open one on the list?" she asks, already reaching for a pen. "They're all stunningly beautiful—Imperial work, of course, nobody else can put up a house even a tenth as fast."

"Um - only if it's not a bother, but I would like to see them. There are a lot of stunningly beautiful houses that I would still prefer not to live in."

What if all of the stunningly beautiful shelves were two meters off the ground. What then.

"Sure—Vosce, do you—" (Vosce starts nodding.) "—have time to—good, okay, Hyacinth Lane is free from number six onward, start him there, are you going yourself or—" (Vosce starts shaking his head.) "—great, remember to tell them where to find the keys." (Nodding again.)

"Come with me," says Vosce, striding for a door at the far end of the room, "I'll find you someone who's less busy than I am and can take you to the eastern edge to look at houses. And I'll remember to tell them where to find the keys."

"Great. I can also just... look at them... if everyone's doing things more important than playing tour guide?"

"Trusting you enough to hire you as a clerk does not mean trusting you enough to hand you the keys to sixteen houses and say 'come back when you've picked one'," Vosce explains. "And we're assuming, maybe incorrectly, that you don't know the city very well and so might get lost trying to find Hyacinth Lane."

"Oh! No, that all makes sense. I didn't realize the houses would be locked, and you're right that I don't know anything about the city... and that could go badly, because I have none of my Arcana to guide me, and if someone tried to hurt me I couldn't cut them... it's going to take me a while to remember how to be a human child. Arguably I did very badly at it the first time."

"Sure." He's leading Ed down a series of labyrinthine hallways that probably make lots of sense if you have time to stop and look at a map. "I didn't understand most of that but just so you know, there are laws against hurting people and they're generally followed, at least around here. That's not to say that no one ever does anything stupid, just that, well, if I had a kid brother your age I wouldn't worry about him getting mugged in the street."

Neither did Peter, he does not say.

"Thanks," he says instead. "I'll try to be less paranoid."

"Oh, you know, it's not that you shouldn't think about how to handle yourself in bad situations at all, just that the kind of bad situation you're in for if you wander around Skygarden by yourself is more likely 'drunk guy needs me to know all about his rock collection and won't go away' than anything where a sharp object figures into your answer. I mean, I suppose I could've stabbed him if I'd had a knife, but then I'd be the one doing a crime and I don't have time for that."

"...huh. I don't know that I'd consider that a bad situation anyway, unless I wouldn't know if he'd try to hurt me. I like rocks too."

"Well, then maybe you'll be fine. Or maybe you'll be afraid that drunk people talking about rocks will get violent unexpectedly. I guess I can't rule out that he might have, but he didn't, in the end."

"Yeah. You never do really know. ...it'll probably be easier to relax around unpredictable drunks than. People who are too nice. But I think if they're really nice they can deal."

Is that the sound of administrative actions he hears, so that he doesn't corner himself into explaining how he died twice today? It should really be that.