“It’s not quite that bad,” Kyle said with a chuckle. “Like you say, I’m a smart guy. I wouldn’t put up with it if it was as bad as you describe.”

“Everyone has their own standards,” Clantis admitted.

“Exactly. I’ll see you tomorrow, Clantis.”

“See you then, Joe.”

Kyle tossed off a casual wave and headed into the neighborhood called The End, because it had, once upon a time, been at the end of a long road that connected several of Cyre’s cities. The name had stuck, and now had quite different connotations. Kyle’s own name had not passed his lips since he left the Morning Starto live here; instead he had called himself Joe Brady, because it was a bland name with absolutely no resonance for him. Except for the fact that he was a mass murderer, Kyle had been a little sorry that John Abbott hadn’t lived longer—while it had lasted, their relationship had been an educational one.

Kyle tried to clear his head before venturing into The End. The mazelike streets were unmarked, for the most part, the buildings nearly identical. There were vehicles on the streets, sometimes moving faster than was safe, and few sidewalks, no specially designated pedestrian areas. And, as Clantis had hinted at, it wasn’t the safest neighborhood in the city. Kyle had seen dangerous neighborhoods on a number of planets, in fact, and with the possible benefit that there didn’t seem to be any Tholian neighbors here, this was one of the worst.

Which made it, of course, perfect. Or as nearly so as he could hope.

Most buildings on Hazimot, it seemed, were round, or at least rounded off. By the time Kyle had been on the planet a few days, he had understood why. Another effect of the dual suns was wind, and lots of it. It slipped around the curved buildings, where more squared-off ones would have resisted and eventually been damaged in the process. When the winds blew on Hazimot, everything bowed to them.

This golden evening, though, the air was still, and The End was quiet as Kyle walked its confusing streets. A few of the locals were out, standing on the streets or sitting on the stairs of their buildings, dodging the sweltering heat that could build up inside. They watched him pass, most without comment, though there was an occasional hand raised in greeting. Poverty was rampant in this neighborhood, and most of those Kyle saw didn’t have jobs to take them out of it during the long hot days, or much inside to keep them occupied at night.

After the death of John Abbott, Kyle had studied up on the Class-M planets that the Morning Starwould be visiting. Hazimot had met his requirements in a number of ways. It was not a Federation planet, nor would it be anytime soon, Kyle was certain. It was politically unstable, with armed and economic conflict among a few superpowers and a host of lesser ones. Within Cyre there was an enormous gap between rich and poor, and the scramble for money was one of the society’s most prevalent features. Kyle was reminded of the Gilded Age of the early twentieth-century United States, just before the Great Depression helped even things out.

It was not, by any means, an ideal place to live. But that made it good for Kyle. He was unlikely to run into anyone he knew, and it was unlikelier still that anyone who knew him would look for him here. Since one needed money to buy goods here, he worked, but instead of a military or government job, as he had at home, he worked at menial labor. He was paid in cash daily by contractors working for the city. If he showed up and worked, he was paid, but if he didn’t that was okay too. No one sought him out, until he’d made friends with Clantis, which had happened more or less by accident. Now, if he skipped a day, Clantis noticed. Clantis invited him home, asked him over for meals with his family, took an interest in his welfare. That was just the kind of thing Kyle didn’t want.

At one point, five streets came together in a starburst pattern, and the most direct route home was straight across the middle of the star. But as Kyle stepped toward the center of the intersection, a two-person transport came hurtling down the street, skating just centimeters above the surface, kicking up dust and small stones as it charged. Kyle dodged, slamming back into the nearest building, and felt the wind tear at him as it passed. He started out again, but saw a police transport coming behind, half a dozen officers inside. Living in The End, Kyle had learned the poor person’s instinctive distrust of law enforcement, of police who enforced the laws made by the rich for the benefit of the rich. He hadn’t, to his knowledge, broken any of the laws of the city, but still he shied away from the oncoming vehicle.

For that matter, he realized, he hadn’t been breaking any laws back home when the Starfleet officers started gunning for him. So maybe that wasn’t necessarily a good indicator.

As he stood there, eyes downcast, the police officers cruised past him. A dropfly, attracted by his stillness, landed on his cheek. He twitched a couple of times and the thing flew away without biting. He was glad—raising a hand toward it might have alerted the cops, and in this neighborhood you didn’t want to do that if you could help it. When the police had gone from sight, he continued toward the place he had started to think of as home.

“Tough day in the ditches?” Elxenten asked when he saw Kyle climbing the three wide, curving steps toward the front door of their building. He had, in fact, been building walls all day, but the first day he’d met Elx he’d been filthy and bedraggled after a day of digging ditches for a sewage system, and that had been the Cyrian’s standard greeting ever since. He shot a grin at the older man, who’d done his share of ditchdigging over the years.

“That’s right,” he said. “Everything okay on the home front?”

Elxenten scratched his grizzled chin and laughed. “Yeah, no trouble here.”

That, Kyle had learned, was Elx’s highest praise. “No trouble” was as good as his life got. He had lived on Hazimot for what Kyle estimated would have been forty Earth years, but he looked at least seventy. His hair was pure white, and sparse, and a thin coating of white fuzz covered his chin and cheeks. Like Clantis, he had copper-colored skin, but this was copper that had been tarnished for too long. “Glad to hear it,” Kyle said.

“Michelle’s grilling up some hesturn, if you’re hungry.”

“Hesturn?” Kyle echoed. “Must have been a good day.” Hesturn was a kind of fish that lived in the local creeks. They were hard to catch, though, and, while considered fairly common in most parts of Cozzen, they were rare enough in The End to be notable.

“Yeah, it was,” Elx said. “You should’ve seen her when she came in, carrying five of the ugly beasts in a bag like it was treasure, a smile as bright as Iamme on her face.”

“Sorry I missed that,” Kyle replied. Michelle, a human who’d been here for a few years, was a lovely woman, especially, Kyle believed, when she smiled.

“She’s probably sorry you did too,” Elx told him. “Lady’s sweet on you, Joe.”

Kyle laughed. “Right,” he said sarcastically. “Because I’m such a good catch.”

Elx fixed him with a clear-eyed gaze, and rose up from his seat on the steps. “Steady worker. Honest man, far as I can tell. No obvious addictions. Don’t get into a lot of fights. What’s wrong with that?”

“You’d have to ask Michelle,” Kyle answered. “If I was her, I’d go for me in a heartbeat.”

Elx clapped a hand on Kyle’s shoulder that almost knocked him to the floor. As was typical with Cyrian men, Elxenten was big and powerful, with the overdeveloped shoulder muscles that made him look like he was wearing padding. “Maybe I’ll just do that. After I’ve got a gut full of her hestum. Let’s go on back.”

Kyle reached the door first and held it open for Elx, who nodded his appreciation as he passed. The building had been, in its heyday, a mundane apartment building, and still served essentially that same function today with the exception that nobody collected any rent. The front room was a lobby area, its gold paint flaked and peeling. There wasn’t a corner in the place; every wall swooped and arced in reflection of the outside curvature. It was, Kyle thought, an interesting contrast to Starbase 311, which went to such trouble to hide its curved nature. Stairways wound up from the lobby to the various apartments above, and through the lobby there was a courtyard, shared with the other buildings clustered around. It was here, on a heavy grating over an open fire pit, that Michelle was grilling her fish. Kyle could see her through the small-paned double doors, the evening’s last slanted rays of light slipping through a space between two buildings and striking her honey-colored hair like a fireball bursting into life. She saw him watching her and laughed, waving her tongs at him like an admonishing finger. It had been a long time since he’d known a woman so alive.