Today feels like a good day, Lenah thought. She looked out the window of her room just to be sure. It was sunny.

The sun had risen high today–higher than usual, she thought, although wasn’t it so hard to be sure?–and it was sending bright shafts of light through the glass, sparkling and dancing on the pale wooden floor.

Lenah watched the little dancers for many minutes. Most of them chased each other, like children playing tag. But some stayed still. Lenah liked the still ones the best. It felt like they were trying to reach her to tell her something, but they always disappeared before she found out what they were trying to say.

A sudden impulse stirred her and she rolled over on her belly. Her arm extended slowly to touch them, fingertips brushing against the splattered wood and tracing their paths. They were fascinating, and Lenah had a sudden yearning to pick one up and cradle it in her hands.

Maybe on a different day should would’ve tried it. But not today. Today was rare and good and special. Today she knew they were not real.

On days like this, her mind was clear, her thoughts were in order and she didn’t feel like she was in two places at once. Days like today were so much brighter, so much more vivid. Days like today, she was alive.

Lenah smiled at that thought and pulled herself back up on the bed. She watched the clouds roll along. She liked the way they moved, slowly plodding along overhead. She had grown up without them, she thought. Or she thought she had. It was so hard to remember now. Those days had been so long ago. Had there even been days? She wasn’t even sure if it had been a different sun or no sun at all. She focused for a second, but nothing. Even on good days like today, the past was still blurry.

The man had told her once that there would always be things she could not quite remember, things in her head that she would never be able to grasp. He had said he would try to fix them, but he never had. Maybe he had tried and failed. Maybe he had forgotten. Maybe he had just been too tired and lazy. Lenah did not know. She did not care. This was the way things were. She did not mourn for the past, and today was not the day for such rotten thoughts.

She looked at her brother, who was still sitting in his bed. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving silently. It was some sort of chant, she thought. Or maybe a song.

“What are you doing?” she said.

He looked annoyed. “I already told you,” he said, “you’re having one of your bad days.”

“I am?” She frowned. What did that mean exactly? Bad as in unhappy or bad as in sad? Because she wasn't either of those things right now. She was happy. This was a good day.

She looked back outside. Her eyesight had improved in the last few minutes, she noticed. She could see details in the landscape she couldn’t before. Details on the leaves, texture in the bricks. It was greener than before, too. She liked that. Colours always made her smile.

She looked at her brother, who was still sitting in his bed. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving silently. It was some sort of chant, she thought. Or maybe a song.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“You’re confused, you should go back to sleep.” Lenah frowned. She didn't feel like she was confused. It felt normal to be here, with her brother and the nice trees outside her window. She liked trees very much.

“I’m not confused,” she said.

“You are. We’ve had this conversation before. Three times already.”

“I don’t–”

“–You don’t remember, I know. It’s okay. I don’t remember sometimes too.”

Lenah stretched and looked around the room. There wasn’t much there, and she decided she needed to decorate it. Today felt like waking up after a long nap. She smiled at one of the spiders at the corner of the wall, and he smiled back sympathetically. Lenah didn’t think much of it. Spiders were notoriously deceitful. They smiled at everyone. It was how they got their prey.

She looked at her brother, who was still sitting in his bed. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving silently. It was some sort of chant, she thought. Or maybe a song.

“What are you doing?”

He sighed, then got up. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” he said.

Lenah nodded. She could feel the sincerity in his voice and that made her happy. She took careful note of his words.

“You’re a good person,” she said suddenly.

Her brother stopped in his tracks. “Why?” he asked.

“Because you put up with me,” Lenah said. She felt the sudden need to reciprocate for so many things, but she couldn’t. She just had words. “Because you are patient and understanding and you put up with me. You put up with them. You put up with here. Because you’re barely recognisable, I’m barely recognisable, we’re shadows of our former selves. But you are kind and generous and not bitter or selfish.” She paused. “And you put up with me. I don’t think I am.”

Her brother looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t think I would,” he said. “Grammar. It’s a hypothetical.” He left down the stairs.

Lenah just shook her head. That had not been what she meant.

Yesterday he had sat next to her while she cried and he had talked. He had patted her on the back for many hours and listened. Yesterday had been a bad day. She had remembered before, he had not. Days like that, everything felt horrifically close and she felt horrifically big. Too big for this small place.

But today was a good day. Tomorrow, she was not sure. Yesterday was too late. But today, yes today, she would do something exciting. Something interesting and new. Just for today. Just for as long as she was given because she was given precious little. Today would be good.

There were footsteps on the stairs.

Lenah instantly knew it was not her brother. He smelled like a Wanderer, like her. This person was human but with traces of something else.

A young woman walked through the open door and into Lenah’s room. She was a tall woman, made to look taller by her long hair and lean build, which was slim and muscular. Her eyes looked tired and vague and her mouth was wide and thin. Lenah was not sure if she was pretty–the old human concept was still a bit alien to her, but she assumed that she was.

“Lenah?” the girl asked in a mild voice.

“I’m Lenah.”

“Yes, I know. I’m just here to ask you a few questions, then I’ll be on my way. It’ll be quick. Alright?”

Lenah nodded. She wasn’t sure if this was part of the plan for it being a good day or not, but it did seem vaguely different. She liked different. She liked to try new things. It was how they got into this situation in the first place.

The woman–the town warder, Lenah thought, because she was the only person in town that smelled like that–eased herself into a chair. She had a certain deliberateness to her that Lenah liked. It locked attention.

“Alright,” she cleared her throat. “Let’s start with the basics. How old are you?”

“Younger than my brother.”

The woman lifted her chin and nodded. “Any idea how old that is?” she said. “Can you give me a number?” At Lenah’s silence, she added, “An approximation?”

“A number?” Lenah asked.

“For when you were born, yeah.”

I wasn’t born, Lenah thought. “No,” she said.

“Fine,” the woman sighed. “I’ll guess I’ll assume Wawiriya was right and you’re the right age…” She flipped open a notebook. “Not that you look it,” she muttered under her breath.

“I don’t look right?” Lenah asked. She was surprised the woman had noticed. Most people didn’t. She was very impressed.

“No, you look fine,” the woman quickly corrected. “I meant you look at least twenty. Not fourteen. I just wanted to check if this was going to be relevant at all.”

“Relevant?”

The woman sighed again. “It isn’t, but never mind, I suppose. Do you know anything about warding?”

“Warding?” Lenah tilted her head and her lip bent into a shy smile. She decided that she liked this conversation. People asking her questions and her asking questions back. She didn’t even need to answer.

“Warding, yeah. It’s the art of making barriers. You cast a spell for a specific thing, decide where you want the barrier, and that particular thing won’t be able to cross that line.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It sounds fun,” Lenah said. She watched her chest rise and fall with the words.

“Well, sometimes it is,” the woman said. “It’s hard work though. You need to be very specific about what kind of thing a ward can block. If the ward is keyed to nickel, it won’t stop iron. If it’s coded to brushbox wood, it’s not going to block ironbark. So.” The woman seemed to have reached a point in the conversation. “How good are you with that? You need to memorise a lot of things.”

“No,” Lenah said.

“No, as in you’re bad at it?”

Bad. She already had known that once. Not anymore, but she had at some point.

“No,” Lenah repeated. But she didn’t need to be good at it. Back before when she was smart, she had read it in a book. She already knew somewhere, on bad days.

Lenah wrapped a curl of hair around her finger and spun it until it indented the skin. It did not hurt. Then she spun it the other way. “What do you think of the bugs?” she asked.

“Erm,” the woman said. She did not seem to have expected that question. Silly girl. She should have. “I don’t think I’ve thought about it much. Which bugs?”

“All of them!”

The woman looked up as she thought about it. Lenah watched the whites of her eyes closely. They were very white. “I don’t think I have a particular opinion on all of them together,” she said. “I like butterflies, but mozzies aren’t great. So, neutral?”

“I’m listening to the bugs,” Lenah said. She put her ear against the frame of the bed to demonstrate. “They’re saying they want us all dead.”

The woman seemed to tense at that and she shifted a bit in her seat. “Yes,” she said. She tapped her pen against her wrist. “Mm, of course. And when you say ‘the bugs want us all dead’…”

“Yes?”

“You mean what by that exactly?”

Lenah smiled and jutted out her hip on the bed.

The woman sighed, thought for a bit, and then handed her a piece of paper. “Just look at this, see if you can answer any of the questions.” Lenah took one glance at the paper, then tried to hand it back. Today was still a good day, but right now felt very, very bad. She didn’t want to think. The words on the paper wanted to make her think and that would bring herself back.

The warding woman did not seem impressed that she had not taken the paper. She pushed it back into Lenah’s hands. “Try it,” she insisted.

Instead of holding it, Lenah dropped it on the floor. The woman bit her lip and then bent down to pick it up.

“Fine,” she said. “I guess you don’t need to answer them. They’re just warding equations, and it goes from easy to hard. The maths determines the shape of the ward. It’s not really that important in the long run. I’m mostly just curious how everyone does because it's a skill every warder needs to learn.”

“Twelve, a circle, addition or subtraction at the third step, it stretches the ward eight sideways, and yes, that shows that the evolute is the envelope of the family of normals,” Lenah listed off the top of her head.

The woman stared at her. “Wow,” she said. “Maybe I should’ve expected that, but your brother only got three when I interviewed him.”

“The Snap hit him harder,” Lenah said simply, although it was not obvious, even to her.

“I’m sorry.”

Lenah suspected that her brother had lost more of himself in the Snap than she had for a long time. On good days, she even felt sorry for him. On bad days, she felt relieved. It was what made her brother kind.

“It is not your fault,” she reassured the human who thought it was her fault. Sometimes humans needed reassurance, like children. They often blamed themselves for things that went wrong. It must’ve been so hard for them.

She patted the woman on the shoulder. It seemed to make her happy, but she pulled away quickly.

“One last question before I leave,” she asked. “If you were a warder, would you pledge to follow the laws of Kookaburra Creek?”

“No,” Lenah said. She was confused by the question, and by her answer. Why would she pledge to follow laws that she had never heard of before?

“No?”

“No!” Lenah exclaimed. She jumped up on the bed. This seemed to overwhelm the warder woman. She took a step back and then another, as if she were trying to get away from something very scary indeed.

“I’m heading out now,” she said. She held out her left hand to shake. “Thank you for answering my questions.”

Lenah stopped jumping just long enough to take it. “Thank you,” she said back. Then she grabbed the right arm too and wrapped the woman in a hug. The woman took a second to hug back, but her touch was warm and familiar. Lenah could feel her heart racing and her smile faded.

She pulled away and looked at the woman’s startled expression. Her eyes were bright from the reflection of the lamp. Lenah wondered what they would look like when the sun came up. This woman was one of the few who could look at the sun without being hurt, she knew. She wondered if she did often or if it was still taboo because the rest of the humans couldn’t.

“Er.” The warder woman looked at her uneasily for a moment then turned to leave.

Just as she neared the open door, she turned back around. “Are you always this good at maths? Because you might be able to help me with some of the stuff Wawiriya refuses to if you are–”

“No,” Lenah said. “Today is a good day–”

“Ah.” The woman opened her mouth as if that explained everything even though it hadn’t.

“–but that is for bad days. Today is good.”

“Oh.” She looked more disappointed than people usually looked, but not as disappointed as disappointed people looked, Lenah thought.

The woman left, and Lenah was left all alone. She found she didn’t mind it as much as she used to.

But because today was a good day, she found herself wanting to do something for the first time in a long time.

She could go talk to the townspeople, she knew she used to like doing that. She could talk to them about many things and she would ask questions and they might even answer back! Then they might sing, or dance for her and Lenah could watch with her brother and try to get the best seats in the house and they would be so very happy to show her all the wonderful places they called home. Then maybe she could get one to teach her how to hunt, or cook, or climb a tree or do something useful. And the weather was nice and the people were welcoming and the magic was safe and she would get back to her room with her brother and they would talk all about it until the sun rose again and they would watch it because that was unusual too.

She went downstairs to tell her brother her exciting plans. She did not find him downstairs.

Her brother was especially grumpy today, Lenah thought. She decided to go down the to houses to see what was happening. There were lots of people there. Some people smiled at her, but when she smiled back they stopped. She did not like that, although she was not sure why.

She went into a house that looked familiar. Some people were sitting on mats outside of it. They were talking. When one man noticed Lenah, he said something in a language Lenah did not know the name of, but she understood anyway. They were wondering why she was there.

Then someone in the group made a funny joke and they laughed among themselves again. She turned away. It was not a joke about her, but it was still not one she wanted to laugh at. Not for any particular reason, but she liked to keep laughing a rare and special thing. She had learned that today was good, but it was not rare or special.

She walked into the house. The house was busy, and bigger than the one that she and her brother lived in. That house was the house of the button-top door. This house was the house of the sad wood bird. It was also the house of the many empty rooms. It was confusing, but this house could be two things at once. Like her.

The empty rooms were full today. People were sitting at all the tables, and lute music was being played in the corner. After a second, a woman came into the room, carrying a tray with several tall pale brown drinks on it. She was greeted by cheers. The woman smiled as she set her tray down near a group of hungry humans.

“You are our saviour!” one of the men shouted, and the rest made the nodding motion groups of humans did when they agreed with something but did not want to say it.

Lenah did not like the words because they were untrue. The man had not saved her and the woman would not either. She slipped away from the noise and went upstairs. There were several doors in the hallway. After a moment’s deliberation, she chose the first one.

She found herself standing in a well-lit room, with a mural on one wall and shelves of boxes on another. Rows upon rows of boxes for books, she knew. People here kept books in cages. It was sad because she knew they wanted to be free. She had once let them all go and many people had been angry.

Her finger ran across the boxes and traced the titles. Up and down. Down and up. The ridges made her fingertips tickle. She liked the sensation. She reached the end, and one of the boxes was bent slightly out of shape, as though that book had tried to bend the bars of its cell apart. She wished she could help it, but knew she could not.

A tear formed in her eye and she turned away. The other side of the room had a painting.

The mural was red and brown and depicted three bodies, if she was counting them right. The rest of the painting was landscape, where the only prominent feature was a dark trail that led away from the figures and to the horizon.

The painting did not show where the trail went, and Lenah had a feeling the figures did not know either. She did not think they had come that way. They seemed too old, like they had always been standing in that exact spot.

The artist had depicted the figures with black pits for mouths and eyes instead of actual features. And the landscape looked more like a river of blood than a place to live. It was twisted and gnarled in a way things shouldn’t be.

Lenah decided she did not like the mural at all. In fact, she hated it.

Something made a creaking noise behind her.

“Oh, hello there,” a voice said.

It was a man, Lenah presumed, although sometimes she had trouble telling. But his voice was deep and he was tall, and although he had long hair surely–surely that still meant he was a man? His smell gave nothing away. He smelled like the mural.

Yes, Lenah decided after a moment, that explained it.

Something about him was odd. Perhaps he had sprung from the mural? That was it. He was from the mural. She would call him Muralman.

“Hello,” she said. Then, “I’m sorry.” Perhaps he did not like her looking at the mural. Perhaps it was a private thing. She had been yelled at for helping the books. Maybe she would be yelled at for looking at the mural too.

“What? No, don’t be sorry. Sorry is for when you did something wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong.” He looked at her again, and Lenah felt something inconceivably sad in his gaze. It made her sad too.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

“The boxes?” She was facing the wall of boxes, he was facing the wall of mural.

“No, the painting,” he said, “the one you were looking at just a moment ago. Turn back around.”

Lenah did not want to turn around, but she did so anyway.

“I don’t like it,” she said. She decided that she was allowed to dislike one thing on good days. Disliking two things was too much, but she was allowed to dislike one.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” The figures made her uncomfortable.

“I think it’s a bit ugly myself, to be honest, so I’m pleased we’re of like mind on the subject.” He went up to the painting and bent down to read the artist’s signature at the bottom. “Three figures at Billy Creek Crater,” he read, then stood up again. “Hm.” He crossed his arms. “I understand what the artist was going for, but I think the painting is too static to have fully achieved it." He held out his hand and Lenah shook it. It felt the same as the warder woman’s. "I’m Multhamurra, by the way.”

She smiled, “No, Tal. Don’t be silly. You’re mural-man. You’ve almost got it right. Mur-al-man. Not Multhamurra.”

“What did you say?” he asked, but not out of alarm. More mild curiosity. Lenah wondered why he was surprised. Surely he knew he was muralman?

Lenah wondered why the man had come out of the mural. The mural was scary, and she wasn’t sure if he had been running away from it or to something else. Maybe he was trying to bring the scary here.

“Why did you come here?” she asked.

He laughed softly, as though it was a funny question. “Depends what you mean, I suppose. But… at the end of the day,” he took a long pause, and for a moment, Lenah wondered if he was going to speak again. “It’s optimism, I suppose. I came here because I thought I could do good things. I don’t know if I did, and I don’t even know if I could, but at the end of the day, that’s what it is. The world is a monstrous place sometimes, and that desire to fix things, to do better–that is what I want to do.”

Something in that resonated with Lenah, and suddenly it was not a good day anymore. It was a bad day. A very bad day. The worst day it had been in a very, very long time. She wished that she could go back home. She wished she could be herself.

Lenah pulled her eyes away from the mural and looked at him for the first time. The man was watching her closely. He was studying her with a terrifyingly neutral expression. It seemed familiar, but Lenah could not remember who she had seen it on before. She wished she could remember, but she knew she couldn't.

“Fix me,” she pleaded. There were tears in her eyes.

Multhamurra nodded once, as if he understood.