“I want to tell you something,” he said.

Diamond approached the window. He was crying without crying. His face was dry, those pale eyes free of tears, but everything about the boy looked miserable, worn and sorry and weak.

That pain shook Quest.

“What, Master?” asked Diamond.

Quest had seen the tall man long ago, riding with the boy inside the Happenstance. She found that memory and subsequent mentions of the boy’s teacher, which meant that this must be Master Nissim.

“What do you want to tell me?”

“That I’m sorry, for you and for your family,” said Nissim.

Diamond leaned against the cabin wall. His curly hair felt the breeze, lifting and twisting.

“For everyone, this is brutal,” said Nissim.

The boy gave a slight nod, starting to agree with his teacher. But he said nothing, and wanting to be anywhere else, he looked outside. And that’s when he suddenly found himself staring at the newborn sweetheart.

“Look,” he said.

“What’s that?” Nissim asked.

“Out there. Do you see it, on the branch?”

The man stood behind, following Diamond’s gaze.

Lying, the man said, “Now that you point it out to me, yes.”

“What is it?”

“A blooming sweetheart.”

Diamond was miserable, but his face was changing.

“Anyway,” said the Master. “What I wanted was to apologize.”

“For what?”

“I was slow yesterday. I should have seen Bits for what he was.”

Diamond watched the garden, the gathering birds. Fifty gold-throats made the air sing with their intense wing beats, and then from a high perch, a wild orange-headed monkey proclaimed his dominion over the distant prize.

The boy’s monkey appeared at the window, shouting a competing claim.

Diamond said, “Quiet.”

Perched on the windowsill, his monkey contemplated routes along mooring lines and the zigzagging branches. He didn’t want to be quiet, but there was no easy route to his goal, and the trees were filled with strange monkeys. That’s why the animal curled his upper lip, glowering in silence.

Quest quenched the flow of fake nectars.

“And things might be better now if I’d shot that man as soon as I knew. But I kept forgetting who you are, and I couldn’t shoot.”

The boy was listening, but he was watching the flowers too.

“So I am sorry,” the Master continued. “I am and always will be. But as one of my Masters warned me when I was young, ‘All of us are doing our best and our worst, and it happens at the same time.’ ”

Diamond turned and looked at his teacher, waiting.

Nissim’s face began to cry.

“ ‘Our best and our worst,’ ” the boy said.

“In the face of evil, we can only do so much.”

Diamond nodded solemnly, and then with a quiet, steady voice, he said, “There is no evil, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“Evil doesn’t exist,” he said.

“No,” Nissim muttered. “What are saying? No.”

“But that’s how it is,” the boy said emphatically.

His teacher was puzzled, dubious. Moving toward anger.

“All of us are good,” Diamond said, his words washing across the dying garden. “Everything and everywhere is good too.”

Nissim didn’t like what he just heard. “After yesterday, why do you believe there’s no such thing as evil?”

“I have to think that.”

“Why?”

“A voice told me,” he said.

“Whose voice?”

An odd smile tried to break the boy’s face in two.

“I don’t know,” Diamond said. “But I’ve heard the voice several times, and it only finds me when I’m alone.”

Until two hundred days ago, foresters filled the sprawling camp, but then the trees began to complain. At least that was the public legend: the brave men and women who harvested the wood could also hear the wood, and after so much cutting and carving, the wood had begged for rest. That’s why the foresters packed up their power saws and their shrines, moving to a different portion of the wilderness. One camp was pushed into hibernation while another was brought back into service. Merit knew some of these people. Peculiar, independent souls living between the two human realms, they traded with both species and smuggled for all when the payoff was rich enough. Some of these people were nothing but admirable. But Merit had always suspected that the wood didn’t talk to anyone. Money was what made these communities leap from camp to camp. If easy trees grew scarce, if it took too much work to cut another crop, one region was abandoned in place of another, more profitable site. And the foresters’ spiritual noise was just another way that those who held the saws proved to the world they were special.

Yet that skepticism was easily forgotten. Moving through the empty camp, Merit felt the presence of its vanished owners, and listening to the silences, he accepted that at any moment the first voice from a tree would find him.

His companion held a less superstitious attitude.

“I found the room,” Fret shouted from the far side of the lodge. “The copper river’s here.”

Startled birds broke into flight.

“Wait for help,” Merit shouted, and not for the first time.

But then came the cold clank of iron, rusting hinges squeaking. “Too late,” the youngster replied. And then, “All clear.”

Barely three thousand days old, Fret was an idiot about many matters, including the need for caution. But there was no telling the state of this machinery, and Bountiful’s captain had nobody better suited to bring an old call-line back to life.

Moving carefully along the walkway, Merit watched for booby-traps left to ward off copper thieves. But there were no trip-wires, and the small room seemed safe enough. Fret was lucky, or he was blessed with sharp instincts. Either way, not so much as a dirty needle was ready to hurt them.

The prudent old slayer was in no mood to dress down anybody.

“It doesn’t look too awful,” Fret said, bare hands tugging at rubber-clad wires.

“The owners haven’t been gone long,” said Merit.

“But idiots left the service hatch open.” There was a gap in the floor that allowed the rain to jump inside. “Another hundred dawns, and rust will start eating out the housings back here.”

Call-lines were expensive to build, particularly in the wilderness. Long wires had to carry voices and codes all the way back to the Districts. The primary generators were always underpowered. And worse, there weren’t any secondary generators on the wire waiting to boost the signals. Both men wore broad tool belts, and both carried alcohol in tall red cans. Fret pulled out his biggest wrench, and without the slightest concern, he straddled the hole in the floor.

Foresters liked their long views. The forest below had been cut and hacked until it there was only half of a normal healthy canopy. Brilliant sunlight was everywhere. Standing at the brink, Merit spent a few moments watching for coronas; the lifetime habit couldn’t be set aside, even today. Then he took a breath and stepped back again, thinking of ways in which this one simple job could go wrong.

Fret’s wrench was shiny and almost new—too expensive to be purchased by a youngster, perhaps given as a gift by parents ecstatic that their careless boy was entering a profitable trade. Corona meat had been cooked and refined to pull out the valuable iron, and the carbon came from the blackest old timbers, while methods older than human memory had built a simple, changeless device that could accomplish a multitude of tasks.

That very expensive wrench became a hammer.

Fret smacked the line below the floor, where it was suspended in plain view. With precision, he dented the insulation, and then he set the wrench on the floor beside one foot, nothing beneath him but bright air, and with a professor’s voice, he explained, “You can tell a lot by the spring in the rubber.”

“Be careful,” said Merit.

“Oh, I didn’t hit it hard,” the youngster said, misunderstanding the warning. “But the insulation looks good. No sense wasting fuel if there’s zero chance of our shouts getting through.”