Tristan fell down the stairs.

“Ouch.”

He slowly untangled his legs. He removed his arms from where they lay crushed beneath his head. He jerked up, not all together, like the Puppet being dangled aloft by its master.

It was a painful movement and Tristan’s feet began to slip. He looked down to see a parched, green liquid seeping down through the cracks of the bottom step. He looked up to see that the liquid was not pouring down the decline but slowly rising, creeping up over the steps like the master pulling his tie down by the shorter end to bring up the longer end.

The Puppet began to dance. Jerked along by its elbows, pulled to by its knees, the Puppet began to shake. It danced and shook and danced again and the master stood above in the darkness, his smile dripping down by its sharp teeth. The master smiled again as he moved his dark creation, moving down a long wide hallway speckled by squares of green.

“Dance, my little machine. Dance!”

Tristan danced. He moved along the long hallway as the audience laughed and stared and shrieked. They made way for his passage and the wicker candles burned silently from where they hung on the wet stone. And down, down further along he could see the abyss.

Directly ahead he saw the people making way for Cel, wearing a bare white shirt reading ALTER BOY on it, President Amenda clearing away those lingerers who tried to touch Cel’s polygon ponytail, Exhibit Director Vektor following away patter patter on his magnetair shoes. Tristan walked along. Amenda was in her last year so Cel would likely succeed. Tristan was happy sitting on the alter plastic cubes. Director Vektor was talking animatedly with Amenda, planning the Midyear Exhibit already. Tristan walked along.

Not for the first time, the school was announcing Cel’s success within. Cel Rin alters our school, they proclaimed. Alter Boy Cel, they said. Tristan heard. The echoes of the school’s Thought-feed and the criers who followed in their footsteps were the same.

“Again, I don’t like this shirt,” Cel was saying. His long black—his rainbow ponytail was bouncing as he walked. Lightly glancing off that small space of neck bared by the open section of his shirt from the back. Vektor was nodding and updating. “It’s too simple. It reads its idea blatantly.”

“Hmm, ok,” Amenda said, nodding. “It was the student submission that won—”

“But it wasn’t my creation,” Cel said in response. “Elections are in May, Amenda?”

Amenda walked along. They had already reached the segment of William Restor’s matrix of hallways that contained one of the smallest organizations in the school, The Announcers, whose room was the same size as the Closet. Tristan didn’t go into the Closet because no student of William Restor did.

He shook his head. It wasn’t real.

“Ha ha ha,” he said. But no one heard him and they entered the room. Cel moved swiftly up to the front, or what front there was in this small space; Cel began talking and the three Announcers—their entire club—who were standing, all bunched together, with their faces pressed to the one slim window looking onto William Restor’s eastbound portal, began recording. All their receptors blinked. Red, green, orange.

Cel’s voice would be modified, curated, and ultimately tainted in order to meet the Thought-feed specifications. It would come out different. Tristan watched Cel’s mouth move. He watched his lips enunciate how it felt to be wearing such a grandiose shirt, or really just how it felt to have trumped the levgion’s Alteryear Exhibit once again.

Someone with green hair stood next to Tristan.

“I hate it,” he said.

Someone next to Tristan smiled uncomfortably.

Everyone had seen. A soft blare shook—like a bronze bell being tolled back and forth—inside. Everyone had seen the steel man toss him out. “Ha,” he said. Everyone had seen.

Tristan laughed. Nobody was even talking about it. Alter, boy, and Cel swum through his mind. Director Vektor was laughing too, at something the Alter Boy had said. The more he looked at it, the less he liked it. Cel’s polygon top / polygon rainbow / rainbow ponytail / polygon ponytail. Colors, shapes, and a black being rinsed out of its original color in the wash sink. So hard that its colors fell out. And the black remained.

Tristan hated it.

He began to imagine. A day far off… when he no longer had to return home to the empty coffee table and see the hands of his father above it. Waving and gesticulating and creating new projects for Tristan. When he no longer had to return to his room and find his latest project broken. Waving its feeble pieces in the lack of wind. When he no longer had to face brown hair that curled. When he no longer had to see an arm that shook. When he no longer had to feel the unreal grassy ground by his fingers that tore at their blades.

“I’ll see you all at the Midyear Exhibit.” Cel stepped down from the cube and began wringing out his ponytail; the colors shone and cast their light upon the people’s faces. “Thank you.” Cel stepped away and walked past Tristan and out of the room and into the long, empty hallway.

But he was only in his first year. Another Alteryear Exhibit in his second. Another Alteryear Exhibit in his third. Joining the Sector Techist Academy for the university he attended. And each and every time—the castle wall—the steel man standing beyond the drawbridge, mounted on his dark charger and kicking his steel-faced boots. “Hiyaah! Hiyaah!” yelled the mouth from the slits.

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No. No no no no no—Tristan knelt. And placed his hands over his ears.

A hand touched his shoulder.

Tristan looked up and saw Y’sazant, jade bangs hanging; Y’sazant didn’t even know. But he couldn’t tell them.

“I’m sorry, Syz,” he said, getting up. Looking his friend carefully in the eyes.

“It’s ok, we all don’t get what we want sometimes.” Y’sazant put an arm around Tristan’s shoulder and they left the room. Following after the others. Distantly, Tristan could see Cel at the far end of the hallway. His apt crowd of followers around, some already with multicolored ponytails. The hallway was straight and horizontal; but Tristan thought it began to tilt. And eager lines separating them, Tristan and Cel, as he walked along in the other’s wake. Like a rainbow staircase.

And Tristan slowly ascended it.

Eleanor’s mother was seated on the dining table on one of the chairs. She was looking down. In her hands were several tea leaves. She was scattering them on the floor.

Eleanor’s father was picking them up. He was gathering green tea leaves into his hands.

Eleanor almost expected them to burn.

“Eleanor, you’ve come back,” Ulera said, but she did not get up. Eleanor scanned her father’s face; it was unmoving and still and nonreflecting.

Eleanor thought of several different actions.

In one action she swept past her mother and father, swiftly climbed those angling steps and into the draperied chamber. She found the alter manker, whimpering and hiding beneath an Alterface pedestal, and put her hand on its plated nose. It tingled beneath her fingers and glinted like a small hand-mirror held by some handmaiden from a forgotten time period. It glinted and shone. She pressed.

In another action she moved quickly up until she faced her mother and father. The latter did not speak but as she moved her arm, the Fire Man stepped in between them and her hand passed through him and she felt something like more than a warmth, something like pain.

In another she moved up and asked her parents directly.

“You burned Mother,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Delano stared back at her blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eleanor,” he said. “We don’t have fire in the Sector.”

“In the play. In the play, you burned Mother. She was caught in your flames and her hair burned and turned orange.

“And Tupil came out of you. This is Tupil now. Look at him.” She was speaking quickly; she was enunciating her thoughts. The thoughts she had every day.

Original thoughts.

The Fire Man stood there, eyes orange and on fire.

“Eleanor, we saw a play, it wasn’t a very good one, but those were fictional characters. None of this happened in real life,” Ulera said.

“Yes, Eleanor that’s right. It was a play and I see you’ve brought one of the performers back with you—it was a good performance, W. Alter was your name? Very good,” he said, his face turned towards the Fire Man’s.

The Fire Man did not say anything but put a hand on Eleanor’s shoulder.

“They do not remember,” he said.

“No,” Eleanor said. “That isn’t true.”

She had never talked about her trait with them.

She had always assumed that Father had known of what she did that day. Of what, now, she knew she didn’t do. He had never talked to her about it.

She had just always known that her trait came from him, and not from Mother.

But Mother knew. Why else would she remain in her room all day, only now emerging—

“I’ve asked many times over the years, Eleanor. They have both forgotten how it happened.”

“I—”

“It was a very good play,” her father said again, and her mother nodded. Neither was carrying leaves; she had imagined it. She had imagined how it all happened that day. Tupil carrying her mother out of the burning ceiling and her father nowhere to be seen.

She laughed.

She stood there for a few moments, and watched as her mother appear only puzzled; her father nonplussed. The Fire Man besides her was silent.

Eleanor shook.

I don’t believe this. Her hands still felt warm but there was nothing they could touch and burn and turn memory into dust. There was someone besides her who also hadn’t told her all this time but compared to that guy in the bakery it was like one of the sparks that soared up into the sky from a fire blazing in the middle of a crowd roaring for its splendor.

Tea leaves…

“Tr’aedis would enjoy this—here.” She walked over to the kitchen countertop. “Here is where he’d be sitting.” She spread her hands to encompass the scene. “I think he’d find it funny, knowing what’s going on inside my head right now.” She forced out a laugh.

“Who’s Tr’aedis?” her father asked.

Eleanor curled her fists and struck her head with them. Ha ha. It was a joke. It wasn’t very funny, she thought.

“‘Who’s Tr’aedis?’” she asked her father. “Was he there nine years ago too?”

“Eleanor, you don’t have to shout. You just haven’t mentioned any friends named Tr’aedis.”

No. Eleanor turned and walked rapidly out the front entryway and past the garden and out the front gate. His house was still there. His parents were still there. Tr’aedis was—

She stared up at his house’s poor minarets.

She stared up at his house’s towers for a few seconds and then walked back to the front gate. There she gripped its self-restoring bars designed like the alternating keys of an old instrument called the piano. She thought about the fire that had escaped her father’s body in an outward spiral and kept pressing her hands around the bars and soon the alter titanium beneath her hands began to swell. They softened beneath her hands and it felt like water. The bars meshed together red in the fading dusk and as from a very far distance she looked at this palace and it was just a small… lonely house.

She opened her eyes. The bars were in pristine condition. They were perfect.

Sinking against the gate, she couldn’t let go of them.