Small moments like these are always noticed.

Children and the guards see them. It’s possible to find an alarming trend at work. Or maybe underneath the oddness, he is an ordinary, immature boy.

But people are watching.

Marduk is one tree hanging inside a vast forest. Every tree is covered with apartments and windows, and there are people wielding telescopes, staring at this one house with the corona on the curtain and the boy that nobody can explain. Even indoors, playing with his two great friends, several sets of eyes are fixed Diamond, reading lips and guessing his thoughts. Then night rises and the household falls asleep, and peering into the darkness, magnifying the last glows of lights and candles, these same watchers study the prize as it settles into sleep and dreams.

Every soldier wears a name and a rich life full of exploits that the boy can summon at will. Every soldier has died multiple times, always as a hero, and Diamond sits on the varnished blackwood floor with those gangly legs trying to make a knot, stunted toes curling as he talks, replaying the killing blows from swords and bullets and arrows and gigantic bombs. He doesn’t remember every game played—his mind isn’t that relentless. But death should be memorable and tens of thousands of good deaths beg to be shared, and it is easy to forget that even best friends don’t have feelings for chips of wood and these elaborate stories.

Elata bores first, and she’s first to complain.

“Let’s do something more, anything else,” she says. “Or we can do nothing, maybe. Nothing can be fun too, if you do it right.”

Seldom wants to be patient, and where he can, he wants to uncover whatever proves fun. Nobody in the world has such a friend, and sitting in this one room, feeling bored, is an honor that can’t just be thrown away. So he listens to the soldiers’ names and the battle names. Seldom is smart but doesn’t wield this kind of memory. When he concentrates, the play-fight becomes crisp loud images living inside his head, and with a boy’s instinct for violence and heroism, he listens as Diamond moves hundreds of men across a complicated landscape that doesn’t resemble any part of the world.

Nobody else has the honor to be bored and mesmerized in exactly this way.

One day, listening to the history of a pretend war fought five hundred days ago, a good new thought finds Seldom:

Diamond is a puzzle.

Their friend is huge and intricate and maybe without answers, and those various puzzle parts are set inside a human-shaped box.

They are talking to a box, and the box talks to them.

Except now Elata and Seldom and the box are snacking on finger-dabs, and thirty-seven soldiers have been charged with defending a fortress built from armor and white light.

The enemy is a monstrous giant marching its way up the long hill.

“What does that mean?” asks Elata. “What is a hill?”

She is interested, but only a little bit.

Diamond stops talking. He doesn’t want to stop, but he can’t let the question go unanswered. “ ‘Hill’ is a papio word. The ground of the world rises to one high point.”

But that’s not quite how the papio use it.

Elata squints. “What, like on the reef? At the edge of the world?”

Diamond pauses, considering.

“That’s where this is, on the reef,” says Seldom, and he bends forward, wanting the story to continue.

But Diamond says, “No, it isn’t on the reef. I’m talking about a different hill.”

Seldom is wrong, which makes him uncomfortable.

Diamond uses hands and words to describe what he imagines—a cone resting on a flat surface. There are few trees in this place and they grow in the wrong direction, rising up instead of dangling down. And the cone is a tall important place on this impossible terrain, and so it must be defended to the last man.

“I don’t understand,” Elata complains.

Seldom doesn’t understand either. But he won’t say it.

“Did you imagine this after our visit to the reef?” Elata asks.

Diamond shakes his head. “This game was from before. This is one of the first big battles that I ever thought up.”

“It’s just a game,” Seldom says.

Elata shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

The three of them sit quietly, each working with the problem.

“I’ve asked this already,” says Elata. “But what do you remember from before? Before you were living with your folks and us, I mean.”

The boy closes his eyes.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Inside the corona,” she says.

Diamond shakes his head.

Then Seldom sees what has always wanted to be noticed. Leaning forward, he says, “The cone and fort . . . maybe they’re leftover from your life before . . . ”

Diamond thinks for a moment. “Maybe,” is all he can say.

“Maybe you were a soldier once,” Elata says, “and you battled the monsters in the same way.”

“I don’t think so,” Diamond says.

The day is getting old. The evening meal is coming, and two of them will have to hurry home.

“But your memory is so good,” Seldom says. “How can you forget everything from before?”

“Maybe there wasn’t any ‘before,’ ” Elata says.

“I don’t know how long I was inside the corona,” Diamond says.

The finger-dabs have made Seldom hungry. He stands and waits for Elata to stand, ready to walk out together.

But she doesn’t get up.

“I don’t think you were a soldier either,” she says.

“You said he was,” Seldom says.

“I was wrong,” she says. “He was just a baby, and the game came with him from somewhere else.”

She gets up, and Seldom moves toward the door.

“Monsters,” she says.

The boys look at her, each with a serious face.

“I hope your monsters don’t come here looking for you,” she says.

Then both friends hurry out the room’s door and the house’s door, past the waiting guards, running hard and not just because their stomachs are complaining.

Dream has a longer reach than memory.

The boy sleeps, putting him in a realm where the ordinary dances with the fantastic. This is the nature of dream. But there are faces that he sees while he sleeps—reliable, familiar faces—that look so much like his face. The same few voices whisper to him and sing to him in a dense quick language that has never been heard in this Creation. Yet Diamond understands every word. He must understand them because when they talk, he laughs, and then they talk again and he cries. Those known faces are smiling and weeping as they deliver some vital last instruction—shaking him to help him remember—and he tries hard to remember, pulling his limp body out of the sleep, back into the room that he knows better than any other.

Diamond is awake, and what did the dreams tell him?

Quite a lot, but all he remembers is the warm touch of familiar hands.

Good sleeps at his feet, chirping as his dreaming legs twitch. The boy sits up in bed, measuring the darkness, deciding that the night is in no mood to leave. Slipping out from under the sheets, he tiptoes through the bedroom and past the kitchen, entering the tiny closet where a polished coral bowl waits for his urine.

His pee smells different from other people’s pee.

Finished with the chore, he continues touring home, passing his parents’ bedroom where a curtain hangs and two different chests breathe and growl, his mother muttering wet words about being quick and careful.

It seems that everybody is caught up in dreams tonight.

The next turn delivers him to the front of the house. His father’s gray work clothes used to hang inside the one large closet there, but he doesn’t hunt coronas anymore. As a testament to his age and skill, or maybe because his son misses him when he is gone, Merit has been made into a teacher. He works at the Ivory Station on Hanner, when he works. His clothes are normal now. Only one uniform remains—armored fabric closer to white than black and dark goggles and boots designed to protect careless feet—and those items hang at the back of the closet, clean enough to appear new and barely smelling of corona blood and guts.