The basement smelled like old wood and cold stone.

  Dorian came down the stairs first, lowering his umbrella, shaking the rain from it before folding it closed. He removed his coat and hung it on the hook beside the bottom step with the practiced ease of a man who had done it a hundred times before. The Governor was already at the table, pulling a beer from the small fridge beside it, settling into his chair like a man settling into the only place in the world that made sense to him.

  Dorian retrieved two glasses from the cabinet. He brought them to the table and sat down. They poured their drinks. Neither spoke for a moment. The rain was audible even down here, muffled but persistent, tapping against the street grates above them.

  Dorian broke the silence first.

  "Tonight was different. Don't you agree?"

  The Governor took a sip. Not of the beer. Something older. He held it a second before swallowing, looking at the far wall the way a man looks at something that isn't there.

  "No," he said. "I don't."

  Dorian stopped just before his glass reached his lips. He set it back down.

  "Why?"

  "Nothing was special about what happened today." The Governor's voice was even. Unbothered. "Just another boy. Just another boy too blind to see what we are doing here."

  "You cannot blame him Ronald." Dorian's tone stayed measured, but there was something underneath it. Something that had learned long ago to stay underneath. "You did kill his friends."

  The Governor's chair scraped back hard.

  "I'VE KILLED EVERYONE'S FRIENDS."

  He was standing. He hadn't decided to stand, it had just happened, the way things happened with him when the thing inside him pushed too close to the surface. He set his glass down carefully. Deliberately. Like a man reminding himself what deliberate felt like.

  "That is what I do Dorian. That is what I need to do."

  Dorian looked up at him without leaning back. Without flinching.

  "Do you?"

  "Yes." The Governor's voice dropped back down to its usual register. Flat and absolute and completely certain of itself. "Because without someone like me. Someone willing to pull the trigger. Someone who can kill and look the other way for the greater good. The agency would crumble. And this world would cease to exist."

  The room went quiet.

  "You know that." He looked at Dorian directly now. "King knows that. Everyone inside these walls knows that. I am not a good man. I don't want to be. But I hate when people fail to see what I'm trying to do here." He picked his glass back up. "We saved this world from starving."

  "That we did," Dorian said.

  The Governor looked at him for a moment longer then moved toward the stairs.

  "You need to talk to Roanshaw. The blue room. Explain to him the forces that control this world and what we built here."

  "How are you certain he'll come back?"

  The Governor paused on the second step without turning around.

  "Because this is all he has left to attach to. He will want his answers. Even knowing there might be nothing left for him after them."

  He started up again.

  "When he arrives you will be the one to meet him. If he sees me first he won't be willing to listen to anything."

  "Understood."

  The Governor left. His footsteps moved across the floor above, then faded. The door closed somewhere up there.

  Dorian sat alone in the sterile cold room with two glasses on the table, one empty, one still full. He looked at neither of them. He looked at the wall the Governor had been looking at and found, as he often did, that it offered nothing back.

  Two hours later, twelve thirty four in the morning, the rain was still coming down.

  Darrel had been walking for close to three hours. His horse was gone, taken by the Outlaw he assumed, which struck him as almost funny in a way nothing had struck him as funny in a long time. A free ride that would listen to anyone. The horse had been trained that way.

  He stopped in front of the gate.

  It rose above him into the dark and the rain, the walls stretching out in both directions until they disappeared into nothing. He'd stood outside gates before and felt small. This was different. This was standing outside something and not being entirely sure he wanted what was on the other side of it, and not being entirely sure he could survive what was on the other side of the wall that wasn't a gate either.

  He stood there for a moment.

  "I'm here."

  The gate opened without delay. No grinding, no hesitation. As if it had been waiting. As if someone on the other side had been watching the road.

  Dorian stood in the opening.

  He had his umbrella. Of course he had his umbrella. He looked exactly as he had looked the first time Darrel had seen him, composed and unhurried and dressed like the rain was something that happened to other people. They looked at each other across the threshold and neither of them said anything and neither of them moved.

  Then Dorian turned.

  "Come with me, Mister Roanshaw."

  Darrel followed. He didn't speak. Dorian didn't offer the umbrella. They walked side by side through the rain and Darrel studied him the way he had started to study everyone since Lockwood, looking for the thing underneath the surface, the real shape of the person. What he found in Dorian was harder to read than most. There was composure there, genuine composure, not the performance of it. But underneath it, dormant and cold, something else. An anger that had been sitting in one place for so long it had stopped feeling like anger and started feeling like furniture. Part of the house. Easy to forget until you walked into it in the dark.

  There was something else too. Something Darrel didn't have a word for yet. A distance. Not coldness exactly. More like the specific quality of a man who had decided, at some point, that most people were not quite modern enough, not quite fitted enough, to deserve the full version of his attention. Darrel almost dismissed it. He filed it away instead.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  They reached the town hall. They went inside. They went down.

  Darrel saw the two glasses on the basement table as they passed through. One empty. One full. He started to move toward a chair and Dorian said, without looking back, "Not there. Follow."

  He followed.

  Through the back of the basement, through a door he hadn't noticed, into a room that was nothing like the rest of the building. The walls were a deep and perfect blue. Not painted. Something deeper than paint, as if the color had been pressed into the material itself. There was nothing in the room except two chairs facing each other at the center of it. No windows. No other doors. The kind of room that felt like it had been built for exactly one purpose.

  "Take a seat."

  They sat. They looked at each other.

  The blue light did something strange to Dorian's face. Made it harder to read. Or maybe it was that in here, away from the corridors and the rain and the motion of going somewhere, the mask he wore in the rest of the world had less to push against. Less reason to stay fully in place.

  "I'm not your friend, Darrel."

  He said it the same way he said everything. Evenly. Like a correction being made before an error could compound.

  "None of us are. Deep down I think perhaps you thought we were, or hoped we might be. I respect you, as I believe every human being deserves basic respect. But I do not care for you the way you might want me to." He paused. "I want to answer any questions you have. Any at all."

  Darrel looked at him.

  There was something almost worse about this than the Governor's openness. The Governor wore his cruelty like a coat. You could see it. You knew what you were dealing with. Dorian was different. Dorian said honest things in a tone so measured it made the honesty feel like another kind of distance.

  "Why," Darrel said. "Why do all of this. Why kill so many without batting an eye."

  Dorian adjusted his posture. It was a small adjustment, the kind a person made when they were settling into something they knew was going to require the full of them.

  "I have killed one person in my entire life." He said it plainly, like a fact about the weather. "King, the third leader of the agency, whom you have not met yet, has killed three."

  His eyes dropped to his hands for a moment. Then back up.

  "The Governor, on the other hand, has killed or commanded the killing of over five billion people. Men, women, children, grandparents. Everyone."

  Darrel felt the number move through him like something physical. He didn't try to stop the tear that came. There was no one to perform steadiness for in this blue room.

  "He says it was for a good cause," Dorian continued. "And I believe he is right, in that regard. This world was destroying itself, Darrel. There was not enough food. Not enough of anything. People killed each other every single day and called it survival because that is exactly what it was." He let that land. "And then we arrived. And the Governor put everything he had into making sure nothing like that would ever happen again."

  Silence.

  "It worked," Dorian said. "It worked beautifully. His plan worked, and from that day forward he vowed to safeguard this world. To maintain the agency's hold. To make sure nothing catastrophic touched these people ever again."

  Darrel sat with it.

  He believed him. That was the part he couldn't get comfortable with. He could hear the truth in it, the plain unembellished truth, and it sat in him sideways because the truth of it didn't resolve anything. Didn't make the five billion smaller. Didn't make their deaths retroactively acceptable because the people who came after them got to eat regular meals and sleep without wondering if the morning would come.

  Those five billion people had wanted to see the other side too.

  They had mattered just as much as anyone who came after them. Hadn't they.

  He looked at Dorian.

  "The guillotine," he said. "Back in Vultury. Those soldiers. How."

  "He used Will," Dorian said. "The technique he performed is called Deathly Contract Fulfillment. Every one of those men understood the terms of their service before they accepted it. They knew."

  "I don't understand."

  "You're not supposed to. You have no foundational understanding of Will beyond the Continuum Step, which you still haven't learned to use."

  He paused. Then he raised one finger and above it, spinning slowly, appeared a small perfect wooden cube. It had come from nothing. There was no trick to it, no sleight of hand. It was simply not there and then it was.

  "This world operates on an energy called Will. The name is literal." The cube kept spinning. "Every day people move through their lives. They feel things. They want things. They suffer and love and lose. Most of them, that energy moves through them and disperses. Goes nowhere."

  The cube became a sphere. Smooth and exact, the change happening without any visible transition.

  "But some people are different. Some people have a Will so condensed, so fixed to one specific thing, that it becomes something they can hold. Something they can use." He looked at Darrel over the floating sphere. "Mine is called Construction. I can create anything I am capable of fully understanding. If I can comprehend how something is built, how it holds together, what keeps it from falling apart, I can make it. The limitation is comprehension. I cannot create what I do not understand. And I cannot create without limit. There is a threshold. Cross it and the Will destabilizes."

  He let the sphere dissolve. It didn't drop or fade. It simply stopped being there.

  "A person's strength is only as strong as their Will. The stronger the Will, the stronger the person. It is, at its core, a matter of belief."

  Darrel looked at the empty air where the sphere had been.

  "What happened to you," he said. "To develop yours."

  Dorian looked at him. The blue room held the silence between them.

  "That is none of your concern."

  He stood. The conversation, apparently, had reached its edge.

  "You are allowed to hold feelings against the Governor. Against me. Against all of us. But without what we built here this world would have become something far worse than what it is." He moved toward the door. "The Governor wants to see you. Not here. Somewhere else."

  Darrel stood. "His office?"

  "No." Dorian reached into his coat and produced a folded slip of paper. He held it out.

  Darrel took it. Unfolded it. Read the coordinates.

  The recognition moved through him before he was ready for it.

  "Lockwood."

  He looked up.

  Dorian was gone.

  In the space where he had been standing was a Colt-42, laid flat on the blue floor, a note folded beneath it. Darrel crouched and picked up the gun. It was silver. Reflective. He could see a version of his own face in the barrel, distorted, looking back at him from inside something cold.

  He unfolded the note.

  A gift from me to you. - Dorian

  He stayed crouched for a moment, holding both things. The gun and the note and the coordinates still in his other hand. The blue room offered nothing. Just its color and its silence and the two chairs still facing each other at the center of it, holding the shape of a conversation that had given him answers and no relief at all.

  He left.

  Outside the gate the rain had thinned but not stopped.

  He almost missed them.

  The geese from earlier, the ones he had watched cross the sky in their loose unhurried formation, lay dead on the ground just past the gate. All of them. Arranged not the way things arrange themselves when they fall but deliberately, purposefully, their bodies positioned until the blood that had run from them described a perfect star in the wet earth.

  Darrel stood over it.

  He looked at it for a long time.

  He didn't know what it meant. He didn't know if it meant anything. The world had stopped being a place where he could comfortably distinguish between signs and coincidence. Everything felt like it was pointing at something. Everything felt like the edge of something larger that he couldn't see the shape of yet.

  He pocketed the coordinates.

  He pocketed the gun.

  He looked north, in the direction of Lockwood, in the direction of the birthplace of everything that had broken him, and he began to walk.

  Not because he wanted to.

  Because there was nothing left that he wanted.

  And wanting had stopped being the thing that moved him.