He was not certain that he could handle this. He had ideals, he had goals, he had a hard-bought knowledge of all the things that needed to be done—things that those who were currently supposed to do them weren’t doing well, and sometimes weren’t doing at all. None of the careful plans he’d worked out over the years since his first life died in the rubble of Chang-An had taken into account something like this.

He didn’t know if it could last. He didn’t know if he should want it—if he should even allow it—to last. His life had no room in it for hostages to fortune. He had worked hard over the years to keep himself unattached—to people, to places, to anything—for the sake of the freedom of action that comes from having nothing to lose.

All would be well, even now, if only he hadn’t been made aware of everything that he was missing.

He took a clean cup from the cabinet. Like the teapot, it was of inexpensive local make, its appearance plain bordering on ugly. He’d bought the tea set when he came here, and he would leave it behind when he left. No hostages; no attachments.

He poured a cup of the fragrant tea and drank it slowly, still thinking. When he was done, he set the cup aside and went over to the communications console. There he typed in a message to Tara Campbell:

He sent the message, then proceeded to wash and dress and put on clothing for the day. He wore his usual plain civilian clothes; they helped to keep him unnoticed and out of trouble.

That done, he headed out in the direction of Tyson and Varney, where the plant manager was surprised to get an unscheduled visit from Northwind’s current Paladin-in-Residence. Nevertheless, he happily took Ezekiel Crow on a tour of the hangar where the next generation of battle-modified IndustrialMechs was under construction. As Crow had expected—in spite of having deliberately implied otherwise in his letter to Tara Campbell—everything at the factory continued on track and in order.

Over tea and sandwiches in the plant’s executive cafeteria after the inspection, Crow gratified the manager by praising Tyson and Varney’s good work, and by promising to take any of their concerns to the Prefect. The manager, beaming with relief at what he assumed to have been a narrow escape, was inclined to be chatty.

“It’s good that the Exarch sent you to Northwind,” he said, “and not somebody else.”

Crow wondered if the manager would think the same thing if he knew that the Paladin sitting across the table from him was only there because he needed to avoid Tara Campbell until he could figure out whether he wanted to move closer or to run away. “Is it really?”

“Yeah,” said the plant manager. “I wasn’t born yesterday; I know that Paladins are only human. We could have gotten handed over to somebody who was more interested in pulling rank on the locals than in working with them—and that would have been a disaster, especially last summer. But you and the Prefect worked together like you’d been on the same team since preschool.”

Somewhat to Crow’s surprise, the offhand remark did much to clarify his own conflicted feelings. He had been thinking of Tara Campbell as a hostage to fortune, and—as the manager had just unwittingly pointed out—such an estimate was seriously in error. She was a power in her own right, a leader whose strength and skills complemented his. Any closeness between the two of them would only serve to lighten his burden, not to make it greater. Together, they would truly become a force to be reckoned with.

He thanked the plant manager for his kind words and made his farewells, then headed back toward the capital city and the New Barracks feeling considerably happier than he had upon awaking. He was not a man given to public displays of emotion, but inwardly, at least, he was smiling as he made his way up the stairs to his quarters. He would wash away the grime of today’s travel, he thought, and put on new clothes. Then he would go speak again with Tara Campbell.

There was a fat envelope lying on the dining table in his quarters when he entered. The sight gave him pause for a moment—the envelope had not been there when he left. The exterior had his name and rank written on it in black marker, with a scrawl of different-colored ink showing that Security down at the main door had signed for the delivery in his absence. Security would have passed the envelope along to the regular cleaning crew when they came in to clean the floors and change the bed linen and wash his plates and teacups.

He opened the envelope, only to find another envelope inside. This one bore a different address:

“No,” he said. “No.”

Letting the inner envelope fall unopened from suddenly nerveless fingers, he sank into the chair and buried his face in his hands.

Jasmine Flower Wine Shop

Chang-An

Liao, Prefecture V

October 3111; local summer

He sat at a table in the corner back with his head in his hands. A bottle, not the first of the evening, stood at his elbow; and next to the bottle, a wineglass. He was trying his best to drink himself into oblivion, and oblivion was not cooperating.

The Jasmine Flower Wine Shop was on the outskirts of Chang-An—far away from the current fighting, and even farther away from the burnt-out shell of the urban center. Any resistance going on inside the city came from desperate civilians. The local military units had been crushed during the first days of the fighting, wiped out as an effective force for the crime of daring to resist when the Capellan Confederation landed a DropShip and started disembarking soldiers.

The CapCons had double-berthed—maybe even triple-berthed—their DropShip. They’d packed it with two or three times the number of soldiers it should have carried; they’d overstuffed its cargo holds with armored vehicles, with heavy weapons, and with BattleMechs. A single DropShip of that class was not rated to carry so much; it should not have been able to carry more than the local defenses in Chang-An could have dealt with handily.

He had worked the numbers out carefully—he was good at such exercises—before he had even considered… but he had not considered that the Capellans would lie, or that they would put a DropShip at such risk.

That was the first betrayal.

No, he thought. Be honest with yourself, at least. It was the second.

He poured himself another glass of wine. His hands were shaking so that he had to steady the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass. He managed to still the trembling long enough to pick up the wineglass and drain it without spilling. The wine was a heavy red from the dry temperate coast, harsh and tannic; his head was full of its fumes. They didn’t help to get the smell of burning out of his nostrils, or out of his memories.

Chang-An’s public health services had dug common graves for the city’s innumerable dead—drivers of earthmovers and IndustrialMechs risking their lives to furrow up ground out of the way of the fighting, then laying the bodies out in rows like seed for an obscene crop someday to come. He had brought his parents’ bodies there himself and put them in; they had no other friends or family left alive to do it. And the earthmovers had covered them up again.