The boy slides a very short distance.

“Food,” the monkey says.

There are indoor rules. Good cannot open drawers or the cooler and certainly not the oven, even if the fires are off. He has his own plate and cup, and he can eat his share of the day’s first and last meals. But he isn’t allowed to bite anyone, even the boy. And if he curses, which happens too often, Good is sent outdoors again, sometimes for the entire night.

Animals sleep outside.

Good is not an animal. He says so when he behaves himself, proving every other monkey inferior.

He loves his boy, even if he comes across as an irritable beast, giving orders with his muscular body and the crisp, fierce language. They sleep together in the boy’s big bed. Every night Good makes a fresh nest out of torn paper and clean rags, and he always uses the room’s chamber pot or house toilet to relieve himself, and there haven’t been any important mistakes for two hundred days. But Mother still doesn’t approve of Good. “Who else in the world invites an orange-head to her dinner table?” she asks.

“Nobody,” the monkey says, happy for the easy meat and sweet cold fruit.

A long table stands in a special room beyond the kitchen. The boy has the important job of setting plates and utensils in their places, which doesn’t take long, and then he and Good may go outside to wait. Father usually arrives when the sunlight looks tired and the faraway trees fade to sloppy, ill-defined greens and browns. People across the world are coming home. Marduk is a great ancient and very important tree. The only door to the outside leads to a new curtain wearing a giant corona, and past the corona is a new landing that looks like no other: its railing is tall and every wooden slat stands close to its neighbor, like soldiers ready to march, barely any room for a sideways hand to reach through. A great net is suspended overhead, every thin rope close to its neighbors and more ropes pulling the net outwards to create a lovely high dome. There is only one gate where people can come through. Monkeys can slip past the largest gaps but nothing larger. Birds and young leatherwings sometimes fall in through the same holes, and sometimes they can’t get away, flying about panicked and helpless, and the boy never likes that.

Three people are always on duty at the gate. Two inside and one beyond the landing. They are usually men and each is a guard, which is a kind of soldier, though they don’t wear uniforms and their guns are kept hidden.

Each guard has several names and a full long life that the boy didn’t invent. He knows their faces and pieces of their stories, and some of them are friendly and some prefer to act like wood, tough and immune to whatever happens in the world. No matter who they are, the boy calls to them by their names, and sometimes Good teases the guards, knowing just how bad to be without finding real trouble.

As a rule, guards curse easily and with great skill.

Night is coming into the world now, darkness rising out from the cool shadows, and then Father arrives with his own guard walking before him.

There are reasons for these precautions.

“Fear is the main reason,” Father has said. “Most of the fears aren’t even real, except when they live between the ears.”

The gate is unlocked for Father.

He enters and bends over, grabbing at the boy who barely looks human, what with the long legs and wrong feet and arms that are stronger than they appear but never gain the meat that even a runty girl would possess. But he loves this boy utterly, and they hug, and locking the gate behind him, an inside guard might say, “Good evening, Merit.”

His parents are Merit and Haddi, and those aren’t uncommon names.

But only one creature in the world is named Diamond, and he kisses his father’s scarred old face while Good hurries into the lead, already tasting dinner with a monkey’s keen imagination.

After guarding the gate, these retired soldiers have forms to fill with careful words describing their uneventful shifts. Once the forms are filed, they are required to train hard at one portion of their unique job—marksmanship or risk-rating or hand-to-hand combat. Then they are free to stamp out and go home to their mates and children, if there are any, and they will end up in whatever bed is best, and they usually sleep hard for as long as possible. But whenever they awaken, day or night, their first duty is to fill out another set of forms describing their dreams and any second thoughts about the previous shift.

Parts of what they do make sense to them.

They assume what feels silly is really smart, but they don’t waste the effort trying to piece together the obscure logic.

These strong men and very strong women are the result of a long, careful search. Each was born and raised in the Corona District, although their parents might have been born elsewhere. They have unblemished service records and no secrets left to uncover, and by most standards, they are neither political nor religious people. But the most important quality shared by each is a supreme, nearly superhuman capacity to avoid opinions about that one strange boy.

The guards’ identities are supposed to be confidential, but the District isn’t large enough for anonymity, particularly when the subject proves so fascinating. Every guard faces moments when a cousin or childhood buddy or that pretty woman on the stool beside him asks questions.

Simple questions are easy to deflect, and rare.

Everybody knows quite a lot about the boy already. Four magical creatures were rescued from the belly of the ancient corona, but despite his odd proportions and the curly hair and a nose that looks tiny against his very peculiar face, Diamond seems to be some kind of person. He certainly looks more like the guards than he looks like the papio. But his unique birth and curious appearance aren’t half as fascinating as his freakish, unnatural capacity to heal.

That’s what people ask about when they think they have permission.

“How fast does he heal?” they want to know.

“Have you ever seen him badly injured?” they inquire, hoping for stories of carnage and rebirth.

“Is it true?” they ask. “Can the creature cut off his own hand and then push it back on the wrist, and the hand reattaches in one or two recitations?”

No guard earns his pay by answering the wrong people’s questions. But if they told the truth, their audiences would be disappointed, probably dismissing the answers as lies. Diamond rarely suffers anything worse than scrapes or splinters. Four hundred days of shadowing the child has produced remarkably few tales about weathering injuries or other mayhem. And there haven’t been a dozen incidents where somebody had to brandish a pistol or wrestle some troublemaker to the floor.

Maybe the guards aren’t necessary. It’s possible that there aren’t any dangers looming over Diamond. But every person likes to believe that he or she is doing important work, and that’s why the guards see their own work as being instrumental, nobody else doing half as much to keep the client safe.

“And who are you protecting him from?” civilians might ask.

But everyone knows the answers. The world is the upper half of the Creation, and there can be nothing else. Old faiths are the most enduring, and every old faith, human or papio, claim that the walls of this world are its ends. Certain people whisper and grumble. They say that these strange entities—the four children of the corona—are abominations. Guards know that whispers often turn into action. Except this boy acts nicer than most boys, and he seems utterly harmless. Inside his home district, Diamond’s presence is usually taken as a blessing, and maybe he is a great blessing, just as their Archon says.

Trapped inside the corona’s stomach, the children weren’t dead and they weren’t alive. Rumors claim that the papio took possession of the biggest prize, but rumors are liquid, hard to hold and never the same shape twice. No authoritative eye has witnessed anything that casts a shadow. Of course it can be assumed that the papio are plotting to steal the most human child. But complicating the problems is a different mess of rumors about a secretive monster that lives in the wilderness, hiding between the old forests and the reef. If that monster exists, then one has to wonder if it will slip into the District some day or some night, aiming to steal away its one-time sibling. What the guards can’t dismiss, they have to believe. And then there’s Diamond’s famous brother who lives at the very center of the world, in the palace with the Archon of Archons. Except for having arms and legs and one head set on top of a giant body, that monster barely resembles humans or the boy or even the biggest papio. That powerful creature is covered with armored scales and bright sharp spikes, and he has two mouths and a burly temper, and he happily wears the name King, which is an ominous old word.