The next day Rissa finds a local guide to act as travel agent and sets off. She’s going home to her children and I’m glad for her, but I wish she could have stayed with me a little longer. I do not relish the thought of cooling my heels in Cabe’s Falls while I wait for Xan and the others to arrive.

  I stay in my room—paid up for the next week by Rissa before she left—and worry over Yanto’s map. I wonder whether Xan will even be willing to come with me once she’s been brought up to speed, and how I will afford her price if she does.

  I access the local network and browse the small Cabe’s Falls library for something to occupy my time, eventually picking a novel at random. It’s a fantasy set in a world where the few people in possession of magic powers are hated and discriminated against by the larger population. The protagonist is a young mage trying to hide his gift of magic from those around him. An interesting role reversal, I suppose, but it doesn’t make sense. The people in power will always be the people who have actual power and, here, those are the mages.

  When I’ve read for an hour without absorbing a single word I give up and decide to take a walk. Without consciously choosing my course, I wander toward the middle of town until I find the community center.

  The Gathering Place.

  This is the only part of Cabe’s Falls I’ve visited before, as a member of the Talavar crew. I step into the building where I’ve watched and facilitated blood contributions and for one chilling second I’m afraid of what I’ll see. Will the last blood donors still be here, bloodless and dead in their neat rows of medical chairs?

  They are not. Of course they aren’t. Today, in the place where we would normally set up for contributions, a group of about twenty people sits in a circle, knitting. The group is made up of both men and women, all demonstrably alive and in possession of their blood, laughing and talking over their clacking needles. A few of them are in advanced stages of the Pall and their hands move more slowly and with apparent pain.

  On the other side of the big common room, several children are playing a game, the rules of which are opaque to me but seem to mostly involve shouting and jumping.

  I want to find it a relief—all this life and activity—but in my mind I just see these real faces superimposed over unrecognizable corpses in Haven Station. What happens if this station fails to meet whatever administrative criteria keeps it on the delivery route? Will Charlie be the one to tell them to pack up and promise them new jobs, unaware that the team following in his wake will drain their blood and leave their husks behind unburied and unmourned?

  Finding the excursion unsatisfactory, I leave the community center and head back to my room, still turning Haven station over in my mind.

  Why? Why would the Citadel do something so monstrous? Just to avoid taking the trouble to relocate people? Why take the blood? Every citizen in Salus contributes every year if not more often. Surely that’s enough for their research. Or maybe it’s not. I certainly haven’t heard any news of breakthroughs for a cure. Maybe they’re growing desperate and the sacrifice of a whole station is a cost they’re willing to pay to save the world. This line of thought triggers something in my mind that I can’t identify, like a single warning light blinking on my slate screen to notify me that a data folder has been corrupted.

  When, at this moment, my slate dings to indicate an incoming message it takes me a few seconds to extricate the mental slate from the physical one and understand that it is a real notification. I haven’t received any kind of message since we left Nokon—we’ve been outside the range of any network since then, and usually close enough to communicate verbally with anyone we needed to speak to.

  The message is from Xan.

  “Arrived in Cabe’s Falls. What’s your location?”

  My mood begins to lift immediately. She’s at least two days earlier than I thought she would be. I wonder how they made such good time considering Matthew’s injury.

  “Go to Cabe’s Falls Diner just inside station limit. See you there shortly.” I send the response and receive an immediate reply.

  “Creative name for a diner. See you.”

  I smile and slide the slate back into my bag.

  When I arrive at the diner 15 minutes later, I spot Xan and Lucas seated at an outside table, a kindness to the other patrons since they clearly have not showered or changed clothes. They’re enthusiastically demolishing a tray of sandwiches and roasted potatoes as I approach and slide onto the bench next to Lucas.

  “Just you?” Xan asks, wasting no time on greetings. “Yanto’s not answering my messages. What happened?”

  “He’s okay, or he was last time I saw him. He’s just not in local network range.”

  “Why not?”

  “There have been some developments. Where’s Matthew?” I’d rather wait to explain until everyone’s here so I don’t have to go over it twice.

  “Didn’t make it,” Xan says and takes a bite of her sandwich.

  I cast a startled glance at Lucas and he shrugs apologetically but offers no explanation. His expression is that of a man resigned to circumstances far beyond any hope of control.

  “What do you mean he didn’t make it?”

  “We made it. He didn’t. What happened with Yanto and the others?”

  I look back and forth between them, unable to parse the nonchalance in her tone. I know Xan can be ruthless if she needs to, but this casual coldness seems new.

  “Blighted blood, Xan. I love your whole quiet and mysterious thing as a rule, but it sounds like you’re saying one of our friends died and that you couldn’t give a dry fuck about it. I would absolutely love an actual explanation.”

  I’m expecting Xan to snap back but she appears more amused than anything. I look at Lucas again. He sighs. “We got to talking on the road,” he says.

  “They got to talking,” Xan clarifies. “Wouldn’t shut up.”

  “… to pass the time,” Lucas continues, ignoring her, “and Matthew started getting really sentimental about the girl he told us about before—you know the one with the old-fashioned parents—talking about how he’s going to rescue her from them, and…”

  He trails off, looking at Xan with an expression that says this is your thing, you explain it.

  “I asked him a few clarifying questions,” Xan says. “I didn’t like the answers.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “I’m gonna need more than that. What did you do? Did you kill him?”

  “No,” Lucas says quickly. “No one killed anyone. We just… opted not to help him anymore.”

  “Because you didn’t like the answers.”

  “Because I didn’t like the answers,” Xan confirms. “For example, I asked him how old his paramour was when her prude of a father caught them together. Turns out she was twelve! That was an answer I particularly didn’t like.”

  I stare at her. Suddenly those unreadable looks she was always giving him when he took an interest in Ren take on a new clarity.

  “What the bloodrotted fuck,” I say after a moment.

  Xan points at me in a precisely gesture and stuffs a roasted potato in her mouth.

  I feel slightly nauseated. There was always something a little too charming about Matthew but I wouldn’t have pegged him as a pedophile.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  Xan shrugs. “You meet enough people like that, you start to recognize the signs.”

  I suddenly don’t want to know how or why Xan has met enough “people like that” to spot them with such accuracy. She rescues me from this line of thought by adding, “I told you mine. You tell me yours.”

  It’s my turn to sigh. “Well… first off, we missed the train.”

  By the time I’ve given Lucas and Xan a full overview of the situation and we’ve talked over our options, the sandwiches are gone and I am nursing a beer.

  Xan seems ready to accept her new assignment without protest, and I wonder how close she and Yanto must be for her to trust his decisions so explicitly. I wonder too how she will get back in touch with him now that none of us know when or if we’ll be in the same network together again. I suppose they’ll just both head back to Nokon once they’ve completed what has to be the most demanding fare they’ve ever taken.

  We agree to leave the next morning, in order to give Xan time to do some of her own shopping and preparations, not to mention get a shower and good night’s sleep. Rather than rent another room, she takes Rissa’s spot in mine and I roll out my newly purchased bedroll on the floor and allow Lucas to use the bed.

  As I lay awake in the dark listening to their quiet snores, the blinking light on my mental slate draws my attention once more.

  “Why do they take the blood?”

  We’ve been walking for about half a day, retracing our steps out of Cabe’s Falls. By tomorrow, according to Xan, we should be able to cross the river and turn toward the Citadel.

  “Huh?” Lucas turns his head to look at me.

  “The decommissioning. It’s one thing to kill everyone in a station so they don’t have to bring supplies anymore, but why take the blood? That’s a lot of work, and for what?”

  Lucas shrugs. “Same reason we all contribute, I guess. Research. Testing. Medical interventions. Why else?”

  “That’s what’s bothering me. That guy’s journal… I didn’t read all of it. There was a lot of scientific stuff I didn’t understand. But the way he was talking it sounded like his wife was well on her way to finding a cure for the Pall and the Committee didn’t like that.”

  Lucas frowns. “Why would they not want to find a cure?”

  “Control,” Xan says over her shoulder from a few feet ahead of us.

  “Elaborate,” I say.

  “How many citizens are there in Salus?” she says instead of elaborating.

  “I have no idea.”

  She nods, though I’m looking at the back of her head. “No one does. Stuff like that used to be common knowledge before the Pall but now, we’re all completely cut off from each other in little communities with small local networks.”

  “Right, everyone knows that,” Lucas says. “That was supposed to contain possible outbreaks of other diseases, since they didn’t know what to expect after The Siphoning, right?”

  “It’s been a few centuries though,” Xan says. “Why keep communication locked down? Why not build infrastructure to enable travel between stations?”

  “I never really thought about it,” I say. “Maybe they just found a system that works and it’s too much trouble to change it now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Xan says. “I think it’s because there are what… 300 people on the Committee? And yeah, they’re the only ones who have magic officially but 300 people with magic is still no match for a million, or 20 million, or 100 million, or however many regular people live in Salus. Keeping them separate from each other and dependent on the train keeps them in control.”

  “Well sure, but they don’t really hide that,” says Lucas. “That’s the whole point of having a Custodian and keepers right? To keep the mages safe from people trying to do another Siphoning-y thing. Like if someone tried to torture me and extract the magic from my body, and the people who wanted to do that outnumbered me a million to one, I’d be touchy about that too.”

  “I don’t understand,” I interject, feeling that the discussion has veered a little too far off course, “why any of that means they wouldn’t want to cure the Pall.”

  “Better question,” says Xan, “is why would they want to? As long as most of us don’t make enough money to survive without making regular contributions, we stay dependent on them. As long as we’re too poor and miserable and Pallridden, we aren’t finding ways to use all this” she gestures around us at the empty landscape “to fix the soil and grow our own food without magic.”

  “And as long as we rely on the train for our survival,” Lucas picks up the thread, “we need the Committee mages too much to threaten their power.”

  Xan points a finger at him that says got it in one.

  “That seems like… a lot,” I say doubtfully. “I mean it’s pretty intricate.”

  “Maybe,” Xand says with a small shrug. “Or maybe it wasn’t planned this way. Maybe it started out just like they say it did, and somewhere along the line they realized there was more incentive for them to keep things the way they are then to change them.”

  “So,” I say after a moment’s thought, “why take the blood? If they don’t want a cure, then it’s not for research. If we only contribute because they need us to depend on them, what’s the point if you’re killing everyone anyway?”

  “No idea,” Xan says. “Maybe they drink it to stay young.”

  She’s joking but a chill runs down my spine. Hearing her theories all laid out like this, they seem like a stretch. But after Haven Station, I can’t dismiss the possibility that there’s something sinister and systemic going on.

  I’m distracted from these thoughts by the discovery that Lucas has stopped abruptly, a fact I learn by colliding with his back.

  I stagger back a step, starting to exclaim my annoyance, then trail off as I follow his slightly horrified gaze to the riverbank. There, half buried in mud built up on the bank during the rainstorm, lies the body of a man. A second or two after taking in the presence of the corpse I finally recognize the face of its owner and I understand Lucas’ expression.

  The corpse is Matthew.

  Xan, finally realizing we are no longer behind her, turns to see why we stopped and spots our former companion lying in the mud. Her face registers no surprise, or even distaste. She might as well be looking at a tree stump.

  I am still wondering how the man came to grief in such a short time when Lucas turns on Xan with a scowl.

  “You said you weren’t going to kill him.”

  “I said we weren’t going to kill him,” Xan corrects.

  “What’s the difference?” he demands, eyes wide and angry.

  “Your complicity?”

  “Wait, I thought you just left him to find his own way,” I say.

  Very good contribution to the conversation Tali. Definitely not already addressed by everything they just said.

  “Lucas said that,” Xan clarifies helpfully. “Because, as previously stated, I didn’t want him to feel complicit.”

  “You can’t just kill people Xan!” Lucas stares at her as if he’s seeing her for the first time and not enjoying the sight.

  “Evidence suggests otherwise.” She waves a hand at the corpse by way of illustrating the evidence.

  I’m staring at her now too, taking in her calm, mildly amused demeanor, and the detachment with which she can apparently travel with a person for weeks and then murder them in cold blood.

  “Oh my stars, you are a psychopath.”

  Xan frowns, as if she truly doesn’t understand our objections. “He was a child rapist,” she says simply.

  “So you have him arrested!” Lucas exclaims. “I did suggest that you know.”

  Xan gives him a scornful look. “I’d think you wouldn’t be so quick to trust the system by now.”

  “I’m not saying I trust the system. But we can’t just go around killing everyone we think deserves it. That’s not better! I thought that’s why we agreed to just not actively help him.”

  “We didn’t agree to that,” Xan says. “You decided that, and I didn’t correct you.”

  “But why?” I ask, taking up Lucas’s side of the argument. “What was wrong with leaving him?”

  “Well,” Xan says patiently. “What happens when someone else finds him and helps him? What happens when he makes it to the station and starts throwing that charming smile around? What happens when he meets another little girl in Cabe’s Falls and decides her parents are just old-fashioned?”

  I consider the faces of the children I saw playing at the community center. She has a point, but I still don’t like it.

  I cross my arms stubbornly. “What happens if you decide I’m a bad person? Or Luke? Do you just haul us off to the river bank and slit our throats?”

  Xan looks back and forth between us as if deciding whether it’s a question worth answering. Finally she gives one of her signature shrugs and says “I guess that depends on how bad a person you turn out to be. Now come on, we’re losing daylight.”