It’s a magnificent house, compact but elegantly designed and full of beautiful furnishings. We stare at its arches and bookcases and wooden bannisters. There are only a few plants growing from the cellulose walls, so the air is dry and a little stale. It feels like the museum. We cluster together in the big room at the front of the house, afraid to move, afraid to touch anything.

“Do you live here?” one of the others asks Kelenli.

“Occasionally,” she says. Her face is expressionless, but there is something in her voice that troubles me. “Follow me.”

She leads us through the house. A den of stunning comfort: every surface soft and sittable, even the floor. What strikes me is that nothing is white. The walls are green and in some places painted a deep, rich burgundy. In the next room, the beds are covered in blue and gold fabric in contrasting textures. Nothing is hard and nothing is bare and I have never thought before that the chamber I live in is a prison cell, but now for the first time, I do.

I have thought many new things this day, especially during our journey to this house. We walked the whole way, our feet aching with the unaccustomed use, and the whole way, people stared. Some whispered. One reached out to stroke my hair in passing, then giggled when I belatedly twitched away. At one point a man followed us. He was older, with short gray hair almost the same texture as ours, and he began to say angry things. Some of the words I did not know (“Niesbred” and “forktongue,” for example). Some I knew, but did not understand. (“Mistakes” and “We should have wiped you out,” which makes no sense because we were very carefully and intentionally made.) He accused us of lying, though none of us spoke to him, and of only pretending to be gone (somewhere). He said that his parents and his parents’ parents taught him the true horror, the true enemy, monsters like us were the enemy of all good people, and he was going to make sure we didn’t hurt anyone else.

Then he came closer, big fists balled up. As we stumbled along gawping, so confused that we did not even realize we were in danger, some of our unobtrusive guards abruptly became more obtrusive and pulled the man into a building alcove, where they held him while he shouted and struggled to get at us. Kelenli kept walking forward the whole time, her head high, not looking at the man. We followed, knowing nothing else to do, and after a while the man fell behind us, his words lost to the sounds of the city.

Later, Gaewha, shaking a little, asked Kelenli what was wrong with the angry man. Kelenli laughed softly and said, “He’s Sylanagistine.” Gaewha subsided into confusion. We all sent her quick pulses of reassurance that we are equally mystified; the problem was not her.

This is normal life in Syl Anagist, we understand, as we walk through it. Normal people on the normal streets. Normal touches that make us cringe or stiffen or back up quickly. Normal houses with normal furnishings. Normal gazes that avert or frown or ogle. With every glimpse of normalcy, the city teaches us just how abnormal we are. I have never minded before that we were merely constructs, genegineered by master biomagests and developed in capsids of nutrient slush, decanted fully grown so that we would need no nurturing. I have been… proud, until now, of what I am. I have been content. But now I see the way these normal people look at us, and my heart aches. I don’t understand why.

Perhaps all the walking has damaged me.

Now Kelenli leads us through the fancy house. We pass through a doorway, however, and find an enormous sprawling garden behind the house. Down the steps and around the dirt path, there are flower beds everywhere, their fragrance summoning us closer. These aren’t like the precisely cultivated, genegineered flower beds of the compound, with their color-coordinated winking flowers; what grows here is wild, and perhaps inferior, their stems haphazardly short or long and their petals frequently less than perfect. And yet… I like them. The carpet of lichens that covers the path invites closer study, so we confer in rapid pulse-waves as we crouch and try to understand why it feels so springy and pleasant beneath our feet. A pair of scissors dangling from a stake invites curiosity. I resist the urge to claim some of the pretty purple flowers for myself, though Gaewha tries the scissors and then clutches some flowers in her hand, tightly, fiercely. We have never been allowed possessions of our own.

I watch Kelenli surreptitiously, compulsively, while she watches us play. The strength of my interest confuses and frightens me a little, though I seem unable to resist it. We’ve always known that the conductors failed to make us emotionless, but we… well. I thought us above such intensity of feeling. That’s what I get for being arrogant. Now here we are, lost in sensation and reaction. Gaewha huddles in a corner with the scissors, ready to defend her flowers to the death. Dushwha spins in circles, laughing deliriously; I’m not sure exactly at what. Bimniwha has cornered one of our guards and is peppering him with questions about what we saw during the walk here; the guard has a hunted look and seems to be hoping for rescue. Salewha and Remwha are in an intense discussion as they crouch beside a little pond, trying to figure out whether the creatures moving in the water are fish or frogs. Their conversation is entirely auditory, no earthtalk at all.

And I, fool that I am, watch Kelenli. I want to understand what she means us to learn, either from that art-thing at the museum or our afternoon garden idyll. Her face and sessapinae reveal nothing, but that’s all right. I also want to simply look at her face and bask in that deep, powerful orogenic presence of hers. It’s nonsensical. Probably disturbing to her, though she ignores me if so. I want her to look at me. I want to speak to her. I want to be her.

I decide that what I’m feeling is love. Even if it isn’t, the idea is novel enough to fascinate me, so I decide to follow where its impulses lead.

After a time, Kelenli rises and walks away from where we wander the garden. At the center of the garden is a small structure, like a tiny house but made of stone bricks rather than the cellulose greenstrate of most buildings. One determined ivy grows over its nearer wall. When she opens the door of this house, I am the only one who notices. By the time she’s stepped inside, all the others have stopped whatever they were doing and stood to watch her, too. She pauses, amused – I think – by our sudden silence and anxiety. Then she sighs and jerks her head in a silent Come on. We scramble to follow.

Inside – we cram carefully in after Kelenli; it’s a tight fit – the little house has a wooden floor and some furnishings. It’s nearly as bare as our cells back at the compound, but there are some important differences. Kelenli sits down on one of the chairs and we realize: This is hers. Hers. It is her… cell? No. There are peculiarities all around the space, things that offer intriguing hints as to Kelenli’s personality and past. Books on a shelf in the corner mean that someone has taught her to read. A brush on the edge of the sink suggests that she does her own hair, impatiently to judge by the amount of hair caught in its bristles. Maybe the big house is where she is supposed to be, and maybe she actually sleeps there sometimes. This little garden house, however, is… her home.

“I grew up with Conductor Gallat,” Kelenli says softly. (We’ve sat down on the floor and chairs and bed around her, rapt for her wisdom.) “Raised alongside him, the experiment to his control – just as I’m your control. He’s ordinary, except for a drop of undesirable ancestry.”

I blink my icewhite eyes, and think of Gallat’s, and suddenly I understand many new things. She smiles when my mouth drops open in an O. Her smile doesn’t last long, however.

“They – Gallat’s parents, who I thought were my parents – didn’t tell me at first what I was. I went to school, played games, did all the things a normal Sylanagistine girl does while growing up. But they didn’t treat me the same. For a long time I thought it was something I’d done.” Her gaze drifts away, weighty with old bitterness. “I wondered why I was so horrible that even my parents couldn’t seem to love me.”

Remwha crouches to rub a hand along the wooden slats of the floor. I don’t know why he does anything. Salewha is still outside, since Kelenli’s little house is too cramped for her tastes; she has gone to stare at a tiny, fast-moving bird that flits among the flowers. She listens through us, though, through the house’s open door. We all need to hear what Kelenli says, with voice and vibration and the steady, heavy weight of her gaze.

“Why did they deceive you?” Gaewha asks.

“The experiment was to see if I could be human.” Kelenli smiles to herself. She’s sitting forward in her chair, elbows braced on her knees, looking at her hands. “See if, raised among decent, natural folk, I might turn out at least decent, if not natural. And so my every achievement was counted a Sylanagistine success, while my every failure or display of poor behavior was seen as proof of genetic degeneracy.”

Gaewha and I look at each other. “Why would you be indecent?” she asks, utterly mystified.

Kelenli blinks out of her reverie and stares at us for a moment, and in that time we feel the gulf between us. She thinks of herself as one of us, which she is. She thinks of herself as a person, too, though. Those two concepts are incompatible.

“Evil Death,” she says softly, wonderingly, echoing our thoughts. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

Our guards have taken up positions at the top of the steps leading into the garden, nowhere in earshot. This space is as private as anything we have had today. It is almost surely bugged, but Kelenli does not seem to care, and we don’t, either. She draws up her feet and wraps her arms around her knees, curiously vulnerable for someone whose presence within the strata is as deep and dense as a mountain. I reach up to touch her ankle, greatly daring, and she blinks and smiles at me, reaching down to cover my fingers with her hand. I will not understand my feelings for centuries afterward.

The contact seems to strengthen Kelenli. Her smile fades and she says, “Then I’ll tell you.”

Remwha is still studying her wooden floor. He rubs the grain of it with his fingers and manages to send along its dust molecules: Should you? I am chagrined because it’s something I should have considered.

She shakes her head, smiling. No, she shouldn’t.

But she does anyway, through the earth so we will know it’s true.

***

Remember what I have told you: The Stillness in these days is three lands, not one. Their names, if this matters, are Maecar, Kakhiarar, and Cilir. Syl Anagist started out as part of Kakhiarar, then all of it, then all of Maecar, too. All became Syl Anagist.

Cilir, to the south, was once a small and nothing land occupied by many small and nothing peoples. One of these groups was the Thniess. It was hard to say their name with the proper pronunciation, so Sylanagistines called them Niess. The two words did not mean the same thing, but the latter is what caught on.

The Sylanagistines took their land. The Niess fought, but then responded like any living thing under threat – with diaspora, sending whatever was left of themselves flying forth to take root and perhaps survive where it could. The descendants of these Niess became part of every land, every people, blending in among the rest and adapting to local customs. They managed to keep hold of who they were, though, continuing to speak their own language even as they grew fluent in other tongues. They maintained some of their old ways, too – like splitting their tongues with salt acid, for reasons known only to them. And while they lost much of the distinctive look that came of isolation within their small land, many retained enough of it that to this day, icewhite eyes and ashblow hair carry a certain stigma.

Yes, you see now.

But the thing that made the Niess truly different was their magic. Magic is everywhere in the world. Everyone sees it, feels it, flows with it. In Syl Anagist, magic is cultivated in every flower bed and tree line and grapevine-draped wall. Each household or business must produce its share, which is then funneled away in genegineered vines and pumps to become the power source for a global civilization. It is illegal to kill in Syl Anagist because life is a valuable resource.

The Niess did not believe this. Magic could not be owned, they insisted, any more than life could be – and thus they wasted both, by building (among many other things) plutonic engines that did nothing. They were just… pretty. Or thought-provoking, or crafted for the sheer joy of crafting. And yet this “art” ran more efficiently and powerfully than anything the Sylanagistine had ever managed.

How did it begin? You must understand that fear is at the root of such things. Niespeople looked different, behaved differently, were different – but every group is different from others. Differences alone are never enough to cause problems. Syl Anagist’s assimilation of the world had been over for a century before I was ever made; all cities were Syl Anagist. All languages had become Sylanagistine. But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them – even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

So when Niess magic proved more efficient than Sylanagistine, even though the Niess did not use it as a weapon…

This is what Kelenli told us. Perhaps it began with whispers that white Niess irises gave them poor eyesight and perverse inclinations, and that split Niess tongues could not speak truth. That sort of sneering happens, cultural bullying, but things got worse. It became easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae were fundamentally different, somehow – more sensitive, more active, less controlled, less civilized – and that this was the source of their magical peculiarity. This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all.

Once the Niess were gone, of course, it became clear that the fabled Niess sessapinae did not exist. Sylanagistine scholars and biomagestres had plenty of prisoners to study, but try as they might, no discernible variance from ordinary people could be found. This was intolerable; more than intolerable. After all, if the Niess were just ordinary human beings, then on what basis had military appropriations, pedagogical reinterpretation, and entire disciplines of study been formed? Even the grand dream itself, Geoarcanity, had grown out of the notion that Sylanagistine magestric theory – including its scornful dismissal of Niess efficiency as a fluke of physiology – was superior and infallible.

If the Niess were merely human, the world built on their inhumanity would fall apart.

So… they made us.

We, the carefully engineered and denatured remnants of the Niess, have sessapinae far more complex than those of ordinary people. Kelenli was made first, but she wasn’t different enough. Remember, we must be not just tools, but myths. Thus we later creations have been given exaggerated Niess features – broad faces, small mouths, skin nearly devoid of color, hair that laughs at fine combs, and we’re all so short. They’ve stripped our limbic systems of neurochemicals and our lives of experience and language and knowledge. And only now, when we have been made over in the image of their own fear, are they satisfied. They tell themselves that in us, they’ve captured the quintessence and power of who the Niess really were, and they congratulate themselves on having made their old enemies useful at last.

But we are not the Niess. We aren’t even the glorious symbols of intellectual achievement that I believed we were. Syl Anagist is built on delusions, and we are the product of lies. They have no idea what we really are.

It’s up to us, then, to determine our own fate and future.

***

When Kelenli’s lesson is done, a few hours have passed. We sit at her feet, stunned, changed and changing by her words.

It’s getting late. She gets up. “I’m going to get us some food and blankets,” she says. “You’ll stay here tonight. We’ll visit the third and final component of your tuning mission tomorrow.”

We have never slept anywhere but our cells. It’s exciting. Gaewha sends little pulses of delight through the ambient, while Remwha is a steady buzz of pleasure. Dushwha and Bimniwha spike now and again with anxiety; will we be all right, doing this thing that human beings have done throughout history – sleeping in a different place? The two of them curl together for security, though this actually increases their anxiety for a time. We are not often allowed to touch. They stroke one another, though, and this gradually calms them both.

Kelenli is amused by their fear. “You’ll be all right, though I suppose you’ll figure that out for yourselves in the morning,” she says. Then she heads for the door to go. I am standing at the door, looking through its window at the newly risen Moon. She touches me because I’m in her way. I don’t move at once, though. Because of the direction that the window in my cell faces, I don’t get to see the Moon often. I want to savor its beauty while I can.

“Why have you brought us here?” I ask Kelenli, while still staring at it. “Why tell us these things?”

She doesn’t answer at once. I think she’s looking at the Moon, too. Then she says, in a thoughtful reverberation of the earth, I’ve studied what I could of the Niess and their culture. There isn’t much left, and I have to sift the truth from all the lies. But there was a… a practice among them. A vocation. People whose job it was to see that the truth got told.

I frown in confusion. “So… what? You’ve decided to carry on the traditions of a dead people?” Words. I’m stubborn.

She shrugs. “Why not?”

I shake my head. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, and perhaps a little angry. This day has upended my sense of self. I’ve spent my whole life knowing I was a tool, yes; not a person, but at least a symbol of power and brilliance and pride. Now I know I’m really just a symbol of paranoia and greed and hate. It’s a lot to deal with.

“Let the Niess go,” I snap. “They’re dead. I don’t see the sense in trying to remember them.”

I want her to get angry, but she merely shrugs. “That’s your choice to make – once you know enough to make an informed choice.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be informed.” I lean against the glass of the door, which is cool and does not sting my fingers.

“You wanted to be strong enough to hold the onyx.”

I blurt a soft laugh, too tired to remember I should pretend to feel nothing. Hopefully our observers won’t notice. I shift to earthtalk, and speak in an acid, pressurized boil of bitterness and contempt and humiliation and heartbreak. What does it matter? is what it means. Geoarcanity is a lie.

She shakes apart my self-pity with gentle, inexorable slipstrike laughter. “Ah, my thinker. I didn’t expect melodrama from you.”

“What is melo —” I shake my head and fall silent, tired of not knowing things. Yes, I’m sulking.

Kelenli sighs and touches my shoulder. I flinch, unused to the warmth of another person’s hand, but she keeps it in place and this quiets me.

“Think,” she repeats. “Does the Plutonic Engine work? Do your sessapinae? You aren’t what they made you to be; does that negate what you are?”

“I – That question doesn’t make sense.” But now I’m just being stubborn. I understand her point. I’m not what they made me; I’m something different. I am powerful in ways they did not expect. They made me but they do not control me, not fully. This is why I have emotions though they tried to take them away. This is why we have earthtalk… and perhaps other gifts that our conductors don’t know about.

She pats my shoulder, pleased that I seem to be working through what she’s told me. A spot on the floor of her house calls to me; I will sleep so well tonight. But I fight my exhaustion, and remain focused on her, because I need her more than sleep, for now.

“You see yourself as one of these… truth-tellers?” I ask.

“Lorist. The last Niess lorist, if I have the right to claim such a thing.” Her smile abruptly fades, and for the first time I realize what a wealth of weariness and hard lines and sorrow her smiles cover. “Lorists were warriors, storytellers, nobility. They told their truths in books and song and through their art engines. I just… talk. But I feel like I’ve earned the right to claim some part of their mantle.” Not all fighters use knives, after all.

In earthtalk there can be nothing but truth – and sometimes more truth than one wants to convey. I sense… something, in her sorrow. Grim endurance. A flutter of fear like the lick of salt acid. Determination to protect… something. It’s gone, a fading vibration, before I can identify more.

She takes a deep breath and smiles again. So few of them are real, her smiles.

“To master the onyx,” she continues, “you need to understand the Niess. What the conductors don’t realize is that it responds best to a certain emotional resonance. Everything I’m telling you should help.”

Then, finally, she pushes me gently aside so that she can go. The question must be asked now. “So what happened,” I say slowly, “to the Niess?”

She stops, and chuckles, and for once it is genuine. “You’ll find out tomorrow,” she says. “We’re going to see them.”

I’m confused. “To their graves?”

“Life is sacred in Syl Anagist,” she says over her shoulder. She’s passed through the door; now she keeps going without stopping or turning back. “Don’t you know that?” And then she is gone.

It is an answer that I feel I should understand – but in my own way, I am still innocent. Kelenli is kind. She lets me keep that innocence for the rest of the night.

***