“What is this?” Diamond whispered.

“An usher bird.” His father held the body and head in his long palm. “I found it on our landing. Poor thing flew into the window, probably just before I came home.” Using his other hand, he eased one of the little wings away from the body. Its underside was white as cold milk, and each feather was a little different from its neighbors. “He’s still warm,” Father mentioned. Then after some thought, he asked, “Do you want to hold him?”

Diamond nodded, and the bird rolled off into the cup made by his tiny hands. The body weighed next to nothing, and the open eye was matched by another open eye on the opposite side of that narrow head. Diamond turned the bird and looked down the mouth, admiring a tiny tongue, and he turned it over and looked at the golden feet with their long toes and curled claws. Returning to the face, he studied the eyes while holding all of it tightly. Then quietly, more puzzled than worried, he said, “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“He isn’t,” Father agreed.

The boy looked up.

“He’s dead, sweetie.”

Diamond looked at the bird again, but differently.

“His neck is broken. Like I said, just before I got home, the poor boy flew into our window.”

Yet the creature looked alive. That was Diamond’s sense of things, and Father was mistaken.

“I’ll have to take him with me. By tomorrow, he’s going to stink. And nobody wants that.”

The world was full of life. Little insects and millipedes occasionally found their way into this room, and Diamond had studied them with the hand lens and his tiniest tools. Tearing apart bugs taught him what death was, but it was never sad. This was sad. He stared at the usher bird, and finally his father said something about Mother coming home soon, carefully easing the corpse out of the boy’s hands.

Diamond was close to crying.

Father looked at the wet eyes and then at the floor. “Maybe we shouldn’t have.”

“Shouldn’t have what?”

“Never mind.” Then a little later, he told him to do what was impossible. “Forget it,” he said.

The bird vanished back inside the pocket.

“I’m glad you showed it to me,” Diamond said. But he wasn’t glad. Suddenly and for no reason he could name, he was angry.

Father didn’t notice, or he ignored what he saw. Either way, he stood stiffly, knees sore from sitting on the floor, and after glancing at the half-open door, he turned back to his son. “We had good reasons,” he said. “Everything we have done has been for you.”

Then he left.

Diamond got to his feet and stood before the door as it was carefully relocked, and despite trying to think about anything else, his mind was filled with that gaudy gorgeous almost-alive bird. He felt sick with fury. If something as beautiful as an usher bird could be found and thrown away in the same day, then the world outside had to be astonishing, and he didn’t know anything about anything, and he feared that he was going to live forever, trapped inside a tree that he would never see for himself.

In one of his dreams, Diamond found himself out in the world, walking under the wide strong arms of what he assumed to be trees, and strangers spoke to him, and they had faces like his face, and there was light in the world and green shadow with distant walls and a ceiling made of a dark scented wood, and he liked all of it, even when he was awake again, lying in his familiar bed.

But there was another dream, an old piece of nonsense that always left him curious and terrified. It began inside his room. He was playing with his favorite toys when a sound interrupted his fun. Sometimes it was a voice, and sometimes it was music—a few bright little notes beginning some melody that felt familiar. And the voice was familiar too. Sometimes it belonged to a man, but usually a woman was talking. He heard his name called, except he wasn’t Diamond, and he tried to remember the name but his usually perfect memory failed him, losing it before he woke.

That night, after Father brought the bird and took it away again, the dream returned. The woman called to him, using the other name. He always recognized her voice. Diamond got up from his toys and listened until she called again, her voice more urgent than usual. Of course he followed, and like every other time he ended up inside the side chamber where the big chest stood with its many locked drawers. The chamber was the same as in life, except for a tall door that didn’t belong. The door was bright and gray, slick like a mirror but strong to the touch. His touch triggered a hidden mechanism, or maybe the door opened for no reason. Either way, it would pull aside, revealing another room, unsuspected until now. The room was Diamond’s secret, and that night, when he touched the door, he expected what always happened. A great wash of light would pour over him, and he would see wonders, and the shock and his amazement would yank him out of his sleep, leaving him unable to remember any details.

This would be the same dream, he assumed. With that thought, he touched the door and watched it fall away. But there was no flash of light this time, no visions too wondrous to recall. There was just a long gray hallway, and standing before him was a powerfully built man who stared hard at him, as if angry to find a boy where he expected someone else.

Diamond tried to talk but couldn’t.

Then the strong man knelt and greeted him with the other name.

The boy recognized the voice.

“This is just for the little while,” said the man. “Just to keep you safe.”

“I am safe,” Diamond said.

“Until you can leave and come find us.”

“Come find who?” Diamond muttered.

The man had different features than Father. His face had no scars or wrinkles, but it was an uneven, ugly face just the same. He had short arms thick with muscle and long legs and the wrong-shaped feet that Diamond knew well, and the boy stared at those feet until boots formed around them. Then the strong man touched him on the face, fingers warm as a fever.

“When you come find us, bring them,” said the man.

“Who do I bring?” Diamond asked.

But the man didn’t answer. A smile broke out on his unhandsome face, and a voice that sounded rough and sturdy and never quite friendly said, “One bit of advice. Everything is even stranger than it seems.”

And with that, Diamond fell awake.

Night was its darkest, deepest. Mister Mister agreeably went with the boy, riding under one arm as he climbed through a passageway that smelled of sap and living blackwood, two friends slipping into the chamber with the old chest and the many locked drawers and round walls that held no secret door, and that’s where the boy was when dawn broke. Metal tubes carried the day inside that little space—a blood-colored light that meant rain—and he sat on the bare floor, long legs crossed, feeling the slow, majestic sway of Marduk as the world began one more day.

TWO

Tomorrow Diamond would be nine hundred and eighty-three days old.

He mentioned this while making ready for bed and his mother nodded as if listening. She was kneeling, picking up blocks and putting them into their special big box with the hinged lid and rope handles. That was unusual. Mother was diligent about cleaning his dishes and the chamber pot, but this was his room and his world, and she demanded nothing but enough space for a person to walk wherever she wanted. Yet there she was, on her knees with her long back bent, working her way toward a stout little building guarded by wooden soldiers.

“This was a quick day,” Diamond mentioned.

She nodded again, finding a place for a long cylinder. Then she hesitated, focusing on her fingertips before looking at her son sitting on the edge of his bed. “What did you say?”