"Nico is frequently afraid. He seeks independence and self-esteem. He's curious but cautious. He's sensitive to deception and disapproval. He's sensitive to perceived debts and obligations, and sometimes frustrated by emotional considerations. He thinks of himself as weak, stupid, and vulnerable and feels guilty and ashamed about that, which drives him to work very hard for a child. He obviously has not had a very good childhood thus far, and both misses and dislikes his old home."

"I think he's an introvert who likes talking but only to a point, and then he'll be completely done in an instant. He's not the smartest kid I've ever talked to but the combination of smart and driven is a little terrifying, if that makes sense? Perceived debts and obligations- Yeah. There's genuine joy at learning and discovery in there, under the rest of it. Doesn't like sitting still. I think he is kinder than he thinks he is, some of the things he glosses as 'fair' are - pretty selfless thoughts."

"Thank you both.

I don't need your description of what he's already studied, unless there was something striking and Calsa didn't witness it.

To be clear, I have only asked him to hide the full flexibility of his magic for another five cycles, although I suspect he might want to continue longer than that. I trust your discretion and do not in any way object to you learning about him."

So, the bad news is that she's not going to raise a batch of kaleids. But the good news is that he's not spiteful. She took the wrong approach with him, but it's fixable.

He might retreat to a domain of his own, deep in the drydark, and even declare independence from Sota, but he's not going to join the war, or start a new one. She's still keeping an eye out in case he starts researching something dangerous, but her most likely prediction is that he will bring a 'moderate' amount of business to Kef.

And hopefully as he grows in power and collects employees, he will stop being afraid of the responsibility of being a 'big brother'.

Oh, so she does know. That makes things easier. 

"I am actually fairly concerned about reckless experimenting but I think he'd try things anyway if we try to stop him."

"Yes, I don't think it's possible to control him in the long term. As long as he follows the laws of Kef, he is welcome here, and I will plan to adapt to whatever the future holds."

"Control," snorts Larian under her breath.

They're reusing the metal cage, even though Tomas isn't a werewolf.

He looks tired, and doesn’t struggle as they lift him in, just slumps forward with his forehead pressed against the bars.

Calsa hurries up. At least she can make it quick.

There’s a flat disk just under the cage, so she doesn’t have to reach in. She wipes her palm all around it, lighting a thin layer of flame.

Mumble.

She doesn’t want to look or engage or prolong this, but she told Nico she’d do it right. She peers up. “What was that?”

“Oh fuck you. Smash you all into paste! You think you’re so great. This isn’t fair. This isn’t justice. I hope you all slowly die of blood cancer.”

It’s not fair. When Siki came to live with them, he wasn’t nice or honest or diligent. He could have ended up a bandit - a real one, not just a kit told to steal, but someone angry at the world, delighting in coming up with plans to hurt people.

In fact, Siki did commit disinuria, using a cursor to sneak sharp rocks into their end of the huddlebed while Merta was out and Calsa was trying to read to him. She almost forgot about that - it was a long time ago, he feels a totally different person, and she was so scared she cleaned it up and didn’t tell Merta for two cycles and then couldn’t think about it. She still doesn’t know what Merta said to him, but he never did it again.

A world is possible where it’s Siki in that cage now. Anyone.

She steps back, stares at Tomas’s forehead in case he looks up, and flares as hard as she can.

He screams, but only for a second.

Elsewhere...

It has been over a month since little Nico disappeared.

At first it was sad, but ordinary. Nico suddenly vanished, and nobody could seem to find him. People were looking for him, they'd find him eventually. He might be dead... But probably not! That kind of thing happened sometimes. And then her dad said that Nico's dad, the bear-man, said he was acting out, just like last time. That he'd be back sooner or later.

He wasn't even worried.

After a few days, when he didn't reappear and people at the sawmill started talking about it less, she started asking people how the search for Nico was going. And the adults are acting suspicious. They didn't want to talk about it. Even her parents seemed to think she was being silly and needed to drop it.

She wanted to scream and cry at them. Her friend Nico is gone! He might be dead, or lost and needing rescuing! Why wasn't anyone trying harder! Why wasn't anyone telling her what happened!

Sure, Nico mostly didn't talk to anyone, but on the weeks she was with the other hunting kids, cooking and cleaning and gathering firewood in between lectures from the rotating cast of parents left behind, he let her excitedly babble about animals and everything else she learned from her alternating weeks helping at the healers' commune.

He never told her to go away, or that she's loud and annoying. And he never complained about doing his fair share of the chores everyone had to do, either.

(The reason nobody was telling her what happened, of course, was that burning magic is not something one talks about too much to children, or in polite company. It's a private and personal thing, something that your parents tell you about very seriously to Never Ever Do, that you overhear talked about in hushed whispers in the playground and day-care. For little Nico to have vanished in a burst of actinic light is a shameful thing for his parents, for either driving him to that point or failing to teach him better, much gossiped about but not mentioned to the little ones.)

During the next week at the healers' she asked one of the doctors to help her borrow a book on scrying from the White Temple, and carefully took notes, and practiced with her white points- First finding random pebbles and twigs she threw off blindly, then finding people she knew, practicing at greater distances. Having a clear idea, and having something that is a clear link to them, helped. With a black hair plucked from Vami's shirt, she was able to locate Vami's mom halfway across town, sitting in the clearing an hour's walk away.

She snuck over to Nico's house when both his parents were out working, and looked through some of his old clothes. His room was still full of his stuff. Nothing had changed! And eventually, she found a hair, plus a little wooden toy wheel he always liked. Baubles like that help, too.

But as much as she meditated and pushed her magic to find him, there was no Nico to be found.

Asking the teachers at Oak Temples to scry for him for her similarly turned up... Nothing. They could find no trace at all, and told her in plain words that maybe the hair isn't really a human hair at all? Maybe this trinket is unconnected to anything? And that they don't appreciate their time being wasted, young lady, so please stop asking them to try again.

Not even a wispy hint of a suggestion, a vague idea, like she gets with a tenuous link or a poor mental image? Nothing?

...Is he dead after all, like people are saying? Well, she takes some hairs from a rabbit in a box-trap, destined for the stew pot, and scries it once per hour after that. Alive. Alive. Alive. Butchered and drying. Stew pot. Stew pot. Empty stew pot. And even after that, the tracers are fainter, but they still point her towards the butchering table, and towards the stew pot, even days after. If Nico were dead she'd have some kind of hint as to what had happened to him, surely. Or someone would. It's not like the adults looked all that hard, but they're better at this than her.

He must be so lost and scared.

When she started questioning her mom about why scrying would turn up nothing, she finally told her in hushed tones. Nico ran away by burning some of his magic. But really, this would have just killed him instead of putting him somewhere else. He's not coming back. Ever. She can't find him with scrying, not even a body, because there is no Nico anymore.

She does not believe it. Burning magic is something done only in dire need for the permanent and irreversible damage it does, but it accomplishes miracles. It doesn't kill unless you're reckless or WANT to kill, and Nico isn't reckless. He was her friend, and she didn't notice how much he wanted to get away. She failed as a friend, and it's at least a little bit her fault... But she thinks Nico is alive. She's sure of it. He has to be alive, because if she is wrong, and he's dead, then...

That can't happen. It's not allowed.

So Nico is alive, and Nico will need her help. And if Nico is alive and lost, that means it's Lenora's job to go rescue him. Because nobody else will.

She'll burn her own magic to go find him, and help him, wherever he ended up. But not right away. She has to get ready.

Does she leave sooner, and be less prepared, in order to get to Nico and help him more quickly? Or does she wait and prepare more, so that she can help him properly when she does go? If Nico has lasted this long, a month, he can last a while longer...

And she's a little scared. She's probably being really stupid about this, actually. Her parents would DEFINITELY tell her not to do it. It could hurt her. Nico is probably gone. It's not her responsibility to help others. (It really, really is, though. SHE'D want someone to come rescue her, and if you don't treat others like you wish to be treated, what are you even doing?)

She doesn't really know why she's doing it anyway despite all the reasons it's a terrible idea... But she definitely is.  But just how long can he wait? She starts saving her allowance, doing extra chores for more coins, because she'll need to buy a lot of things to be well-prepared. And she goes to the temples again and sits in on lectures about the founding of Gale Rocks, and everything the colonists needed but didn't have, and all the mistakes they made. What will she need, exploring, going to wherever Nico ended up?

What will she need?

She'll need red: She needs to be strong, skilled, hale. She needs tough clothes to endure the elements, food and water to sustain them in the short term, and a weapon. Too much for immediate use pulls away from longer term needs, though...

She'll need blue: She needs to make use of whatever is at hand. Tools. Carving knife, rain tarp, sewing kit, a light stick and some charged Lumen, maybe other tools. Things to make things with. Maybe books about different kinds of craft? But books are heavy and expensive...

She'll need green: Growth and medicine are both essential. A lot of what the doctors say goes over her head, but healing makes sense to her, and she can learn more. And seeds- She needs as many different kinds of plants as she can get, so SOMETHING she brings will grow wherever Nico is. Crops!

She'll need white: Knowledge. This pretty much just means learning as much as she can, and getting books. Nico liked drawing hexagrams, he's good at Black magic, she thinks. And he kept talking about The Shape of Eternity, that book about enchanting... So she'll buy it, plus some others that might be useful.

She'll need black: The future, the long term. Not just food to eat now, but crops to grow later. Not knowledge now, but things that will be useful in the long term... Nothing really sticks out that she hasn't already thought of, but she tries to imagine building a house in every kind of place she's heard of.

In the ocean? On a mountain? In a desert? How would she do it? What kinds of things would make it harder? Water, cold, food... All the same problems as before.

She writes out her plans on paper, carefully hidden in a sort of journal, and makes and re-makes checklists, and saves up her money, and tells the doctors she wants to learn more about real medicine... Days pass, and she still doesn't feel ready. And days are passing for Nico, too, while she dithers. (Unless he's dead after all. Days are passing for him probably. Hopefully.)

Nico makes a point to visit Lin where she's resting, carefully led there by Calsa and constantly wondering where the Tengu guard he can't see is.

"...Hi, Lin. I'm glad you're alive. I'm sorry I wasn't suspicious enough."

He can sometimes hear the click of the tengu's talons, although at least twice the body behind him drops back and another body starts following.

Lin is lounging in a dark warm pool. The aqueduct susserates.

"Hi Nico! It was my job to protect you, not the other way around.

Now that the bubble has slipped, I can explain why Ansaf doesn't rotate, relative to the sun. Most kids don't know it, but that doesn't mean they can't, especially a bright one like you.

So, Ansaf goes around the sun because the sun pulls on it, and it pulls on the sun too but that's not relevant, same as Ansaf pulls on us, and Lacrimos pulls on its moons. It doesn't fall straight into the sun because it happened to start off moving sideways, so it goes around like a wheel, constantly getting pulled towards the sun just enough to keep it from zipping away.

Every bit of stuff in the world pulls on every other bit; Ansaf and the sun aren't special, just really big. The sun doesn't pull on Ansaf as a single object, it pulls on all the rock separately. And one more thing: the pull is stronger when you get closer. Like when you're walking towards a flame in the dark and it gets brighter as you go.

Ansaf is not perfectly round. The bright pole stretches in towards the sun a bit, and the dark pole dangles outward. We haven't measured the poles, of course, but if you go from one edge of the chartreuse to the other and look at what stars are directly 'up', and measure the angle to the sun if it's high enough, it's clear that the curve around the chartreuse is tighter than the curve across it." Lin traces these curves in the air for an exaggerated prolate spheroid.

"A long time ago, Ansaf rotated - we can tell from looking at the rocks, that's a whole other story - and it stretched out like this back then, just the same as it does now. But rocks take time to stretch. When they get to the brightest point, the sun pulls on them the hardest, but they don't get fully stretched out until a little later, when Ansaf has rotated a bit. So there's a big lump of rock a bit 'felward of the bright pole', so to speak, and another lump a bit 'tengward of the dark pole'. The bright lump is pulled back by the sun, and the dark lump is pulled towards the sun, in the direction Ansaf is rotating. But since the sun pulls stronger when you're closer, the force from the bright lump is stronger, and overall the pull goes against the rotation and slows Ansaf down.

And eventually Ansaf slowed down until one part always pointed toward the sun, and that became the drybright."

He can't actually see what she's doing with her hands, though he tries to imagine it......

"It was spinning and stretching, and the stretching made it slow down? Like a ball with syrup inside it? I had one of those as a toy... I don't think I get it. I'm more interested in eyes today." Pause. "Because I think I can fix them," he adds in a whisper.

Oh, right, she's an idiot, she forgot that he's blind too.

"I understand. Eyes need to have a clear piece in front, of the right shape so that light from a particular direction goes to a particular location on the back of the eye, which is sensitive to light. For us, the problem is that the clear piece isn't clear or the right shape anymore. Also I can't move my eyeballs to look to different directions.

You're welcome to touch my eyes if you want, you won't make them worse."

"It's just me, Nico, doctor Shor, and the tengu here."