The world ended with the soft click of a closing office door.

  Maybe not everyone’s world ended that way. Maybe some people got flames or bullets or terrible foresight of things to come.

  Not the young man standing at the top of Morton Street looking down at the little house with its strange little flower boxes in the windows. He got “Sorry for your loss,” and “Please pick up a bereavement packet at the front desk,” and “Have a nice day.” He got a dingy waiting room with a bored receptionist and the mundane cruelty of an administrator scrolling through her slate and casually announcing the end of his world like she was commenting on the weather.

  The end of the world began six months ago. That was the night the keepers came and carried Halim away.

  One minute they had been asleep, Halim’s arms wrapped around the young man’s chest, his body pressed against his back to compensate for their flimsy blankets against the winter night. The next, Halim was gone — the young man left shivering half-naked in the splintered remains of his doorway, with no answers and no idea where to look for them.

  He started with Armand—a friend of Halim’s whom the young man had never particularly liked, but whose connection to the Undercity meant he knew things others might not. Armand’s day job was in a repair shop, fixing monitors and slates and other gadgets people couldn’t afford to buy new. That’s where the young man had found him the day of Halim’s arrest.

  “Most likely caught him buying unregistered mods,” Armand had said. “The Citadel’s been doing a crackdown on that. I told him to wait til things were less volatile but he never listens.”

  The young man had already been shaking his head by the end of the sentence. “Halim wouldn’t buy illegal mods. He wouldn’t even know where to… Wait, what do you mean you told him?”

  The look Armand had given him contained just enough pity to be infuriating. “You know Halim. He’s always trying to help someone,” was his only reply.

  A host of further denials had bubbled up and then died on the young man’s lips. Of course Armand was right. Halim was incapable of walking past a person in need without trying to do something about it. He had been losing sleep with worry about a child he’d discovered living on the streets near their neighborhood. The child couldn’t have been older than eight but was beginning to show signs of the Pall already. She would need extensive medical treatments if she hoped to see the age of 20 and the disease would make her a burden on anyone willing to take her in.

  The fact that the young man had assumed his lover would resort to only legal means to help her seemed impossibly foolish in retrospect.

  “But why wouldn’t he tell me?” the young man had asked weakly.

  Armand shrugged. “So that you wouldn’t argue with him about it, I’d guess. Or maybe so that you wouldn’t be hauled off by the keepers alongside him. Someone’s got to pay the fees to get him out, after all.”

  The next two weeks had been spent gathering as many credits as he could — and meeting a host of Armand’s other friends, many of whom had been on the receiving end of Halim’s kindness and were only too glad to help. Getting together the bribe money had been the easy part, compared to getting an appointment with the Custodian’s Office.

  By the time the appointed day arrived, the young man was armed with a good deal more knowledge about the person his partner was—something he had never previously imagined anyone knew more about than himself—and a good-sized pile of credits. He was prepared to defend Halim’s character with impassioned pleas, open corruption, or both.

  “They’re ready for you sir,” the bored receptionist had said, and waved at the door through which the young man was apparently meant to go.

  On the other side of the door there had been a longish hallway with small offices situated at intervals along its length. At the end, a final door bore an official-looking plaque that identified it as belonging to the head of criminal courts.

  The young man had started toward this door, but a voice from the office on his right arrested his progress.

  “Number 43?”

  The young man turned toward the speaker—a woman seated behind a small desk and in front of a small window—with a questioning look. The woman glanced at the slate in her hand as if to confirm the information on its flickering screen, then nodded.

  “You’re number 43. Here about Halim Ka-Sarha. Have a seat.”

  The young man stepped into the little office, glancing around in confusion. “I thought…” He gestured back toward the hallway. “I mean, I’m here to see the Custodian.”

  “To see a representative of the Custodian,” the woman corrected. “The Custodian is very busy, as you might imagine. Please sit down.”

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  The young man did as he was told, already feeling wrong-footed. Was this brusquely efficient woman the person he would need to bribe? What if she immediately reported him? What if she accepted the credits and sent him on his way with nothing to show for it? She didn’t look like the sort of person who could pull strings.

  “Now,” said the woman, “what can I do for you?”

  The young man found that his carefully practiced words were nowhere to be found. None of this felt right. “Um… I guess I just…” he wasn’t sure how much he needed to explain. Did her slate tell her about Halim? About the raid on their house? About what had happened to him in the last fourteen days? “I mean, I’m here to see about Halim’s release, obviously. This has all been a terrible mistake. I just need to know what to do and…”

  The sentence tapered off and he found himself looking down, frustrated at his lack of experience. If only the sure-footed Armand had come in his place, this might be going better. The young man cursed himself for insisting on being the one to take care of this. He had wanted to be the first person Halim saw when he was freed. Now that seemed like a piece of vanity, at best.

  The woman didn’t answer but looked at her slate again, scanning the data and scrolling with one finger. After a moment she paused with a frown, then scrolled for a few more seconds before looking up.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr….”

  “Ahtwal. I understand there may be certain fees to pay,” he began but the woman held up a finger to cut him off.

  “You’re misunderstanding. Mr. Ka-Sarha has been convicted of a Class 2 offense.” She glanced back down and read from the slate. “Possession of unregistered mods.”

  Convicted? That couldn’t be right. The young man shook his head. “But there hasn’t been a trial. I would have been summoned for a trial, wouldn’t I? And since when is possession a Class 2 offense?”

  “Since yesterday morning. In order to stem the tide of criminal activity, some crimes have been temporarily recategorized.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense.” The young man could feel his panic rising and took a deep breath to tamp it down. “Halim was arrested two weeks ago. So it was still a minor infraction wasn’t it?”

  The woman nodded patiently as if she was speaking to a child. “Yes, at the time of the arrest. However at the time of his conviction, it had been reclassified.”

  “What conviction? This isn’t making sense.”

  “Are you Mr. Ka-Sarha’s husband?”

  The question caught the young man off guard. “I’m sorry? No, not officially, but…”

  “Legal relative of any kind?”

  “Not yet. We were going to.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have been notified of any trial. Is there anything else I can help you with?” The woman swiped a hand across the slate and the file she had been referencing disappeared.

  This was all happening too fast. The young man held out a hand as if he could slow the conversation down to a reasonable speed.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, in the tone of someone trying to pacify a wild animal. “I understand. I assume the fees are higher for a Class 2 offense. I can work something out. Just tell me what I need to do.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “Do? I’m afraid there’s nothing left to do, Mr. Ahtwal. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “No wait. That can’t be it. Just tell me who I need to speak to!”

  The woman sighed heavily. “Mr. Ahtwal you are still not understanding. Your friend was found guilty of a Class 2 offense. Penalties were carried out this morning. Mr. Ka-Sarha has been executed.”

  The woman with the flickering slate in the dingy low-level office had said the words easily, as if they changed nothing, but she might as well have clapped the sides of his head with cymbals. It was as if the air had been violently sucked from his lungs and hung in a cloud around his head. His vision dimmed, his ears rang.

  Surely he had misheard. Two weeks of fear and sleeplessness was toying with him. Nothing so devastatingly final could be uttered so casually between one appointment and the next. When he finally managed to drag in an aching breath, he found himself standing. The woman’s hand held his elbow firmly, as she ushered him out of her office.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The six months between the dingy office and the young man’s arrival at Morton street had been months of misery and helpless, aimless rage. It was, again, Armand who suggested the course of action the young man was now taking.

  “Halim would have wanted this. He was saving every spare credit he could to do this for you,” he had urged. When the young man protested, Armand insisted. “I won’t take the money back. We raised it for Halim and this is what Halim wanted for you.”

  So, now, the young man stood on Morton Street. The house near the end of the alley was dim and indistinguishable from its neighbors, except for a small flower bed under the windows, lovingly tended to and overflowing with hopeful Solanus blossoms.

  The young man stopped at the door of the dim house with the little window flowers and fought back angry tears for the first time since setting out on this mission. Until now, his anger had been the dry, scorching kind that leaves little room for gentle grief. He had known the tears would come, but damn Halim for making them come now, when he was on this threshold.

  He raised a fist and knocked.

  “What you ask is dangerous,” said the old woman who answered the door. She sat in a chair across from the yellow couch to which she had directed him. “Are you certain?”

  “Were you?” the young man asked.

  “I was.”

  “Then I am more so.”

  “It will be painful,” she warned. “It is a long process, and not an easy one.”

  “I know that.” His voice didn’t waver.

  Whatever she saw in the youth’s eyes must be what she needed to see. She nodded once and did not ask again.

  That decisive nod loosened something in the young man. Something that had been wound around his heart so tight it might have cut it in half, given a little more pressure and a little more time.

  The old woman had a trained eye. She must have noted the way his hands, ever in restless, pointless motion, began to relax ever so slightly. For the first time since his arrival his body seemed to be occupying the sofa rather than perched on its edge.

  Her own rigid posture eased just a little. This kind of service was dangerous for her too, he realized. Any one of her prospective clients might have incentive enough to turn her over to the Committee. They wouldn’t even need proof: the accusation alone, especially from a citizen in good standing, would warrant the full force of the Committee’s retributive power.

  “I don’t keep a list of names,” she told the youth. “If the Committee were to come after me I could not risk giving them the names of my clients. So there will be no record of…” she gestured vaguely at him, “you. This. You will simply disappear.”

  At last the youth smiled.