In a wooden prison that was also a lighthouse, at the southern tip of what is now California, a very long time ago, prior to the migration of Homo Sapiens across the now-sunken land bridge from what is now Russia to what is now Alaska, a coastal society of a different species in the Homo genus—which looked very similar to Homo Sapiens but were taller and lived longer and, on account of a subtle difference in brain structure that reduced the frequency of spontaneous language change, spoke a single tonal, analytical language across the entire continent, in all nations, with little to no vocabulary divergence even between societies out of contact for tens of generations—confined those rare prisoners whose sentencing order was signed by the Shaman King personally.

The longest-suffering of the prisoners held here was the hunter, Rotor Monoa. It was the final night of the tenth year of his ten-year term, the depth of winter.

On Rotor’s way to the meet the warden out front for his release ceremony, he passed by many prisoners whose original terms were shorter than his. Mart, for example, who was sweeping between the beds that lined the main hall, averted his eyes as Rotor passed. He had entered with a two-year term, but was now serving twelve because he ate the youngest guard. And Ek, who entered with a one-year term but was now serving thirty for illustrating the decapitation of the Shaman King in feces on the kitchen wall, sat on the edge of his bed and watched Rotor pass without blinking, smoothly rotating his head to follow Rotor’s path.

It was because Rotor knew how to behave that he walked toward freedom while Mart and Ek and the others would probably keep extending their sentences for the next two centuries.

Rotor showed up on time to all of his labor shifts, and devoted himself to their proper performance no matter how rote. Ek had commented once that he always knew, as soon as he took a clean uniform from the bin, whether Rotor had been on laundry duty, because of the fabric’s unusual brightness and the ingenuity of the folding pattern. When anyone else was on shift, the stack of clean uniforms leaned to one side because their folding pattern didn’t perfectly tesselate.

To his career as a hunter, before the start of his prison term, Rotor brought a similar attention to detail. When the late Echa, former Chief of the Northern Chiefs, lost his wife in a lion lizard attack, and wanted that lion lizard’s head, no one else but Rotor noticed the subtle difference in big toe shape between the commonplace lion bear and that of the near-extinct lion lizard, which was how he didn’t waste time chasing lion bears like the others and easily acquired the monster’s head. Several years later, when Rod, present Chief of both the Northern and Western Chiefs after conquering Echa’s domain, wanted Echa hunted, no one else but Rotor thought to train dogs on the odor of Echa’s feces using some of the soiled undergarments he left behind in the palace.

When Rotor searched, he found. It was not because Rotor disappointed the Shaman King that the Shaman King sentenced him to the lighthouse prison.

Rotor had been advised more than once not to take contracts from the southern leaders, of which the Shaman King was foremost, but after hunting down Echa he had become a controversial figure in the north and wrongly expected to find a simpler living in the south. So when the Shaman King asked Rotor to track down a man guilty of treason, he accepted the contract.

At the end of the hunt, the man Rotor dragged into court by a rough and fraying rope tight around the man’s neck and hands was, it turned out, the Shaman King’s firstborn son, who had run away. Rotor had made no mistake. That was the intended target. He had been used as a weapon in a family dispute.

In the moment when the prince looked up and pieced together who had hired Rotor, who was responsible for the month of horror leading up to this meeting, composed of Rotor dragging him through the northwest mountains sunrise to sunset, ignoring his pleading to slow down when the path grew steep, chafing sensitive rashes into his neck and wrists with the rope, the Shaman King’s expression toward Rotor changed sharply from pleased client to indignant father.

The King hopped down from his throne, which was a wooden chair with very tall legs, and told a series of lies whose complexity could not have been improvised. He affected horror and offense, pointed at Rotor, instructed his attendant warriors to arrest him and untie the prince. “You had no cause to drag my son into this,” the Shaman King said with his chest out, wagging his finger and spraying spittle. He turned to the Chiefs of the court and gestured with an open hand to Rotor. “This hunter served Echa, then he served Rod. A northern loyalist. Do see their naked aggression now? To capture my son, and demean him in this way, they are sending a message. We must respond.”

In a performance lasting under a minute, the Shaman King persuaded the Court of Southern Chiefs to assent to war in the north, regained the sympathies of and control over his son, and shirked paying Rotor by sentencing him to the lighthouse prison for treason.

But that was ten years ago. The political maneuver was over, and the war in the north, Rotor heard, was progressing favorably. The Shaman King owed him a debt and had no reason to spite him. Because Rotor understood that steering a nation, like bounty hunting, sometimes required moral transgressions on a small scale to achieve moral progress on a large one, he nurtured no resentment toward the Shaman King.

When Rotor reached the front doors of the prison, Mai, the newest prisoner, stepped in front of him and blocked his way. She was Rotor’s age, thirty, and carried a hundred-year sentence for who knew what. Just knowing the number made Rotor startle whenever she came close. “They’ll never let you out,” she said.

“That’s yourself you’re thinking of,” Rotor said. “Step aside.”

“You’re on laundry duty tomorrow, right? I’ve heard things about your folding skills I find hard to believe. Don’t let me down.”

Rotor picked her up by her hips, rotated, and set her down to the right of the door. “See you never again,” he said, and pushed open the front door.

Throughout his ten-year term, nights had been the most painful. That interval spent lying in the dark before falling asleep.

Back in the central region, home, there was a girl. Whenever he went back between hunts, he went to her house first, picked her up, and then did he kiss her, or did he did he carry her to the bed? It was hard to remember details now. The first year, he would lay awake longing for her, worrying that she would take another man if he was away for too long. By the seventh year, he could not picture any part of her face, and could not call her voice to mind. All that was left was her name. The longing and worry persisted even after what he was longing for and worrying about were no longer clear.

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The night Mai arrived, she kept a candle lit after sleep hour to read a scroll she’d smuggled in, which distracted Rotor from his mental suffering, so he said, “Lights are forbidden after sleep hour.”

Mai looked confused. “What are you saying?”

“Snuff out the candle and go to sleep.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“They’ll make it harder for you here if you break the rules.”

Mai got up and walked with her candle over to Rotor’s bed. She lifted her shirt just slightly, to reveal a deep gash across her abdomen, turning green. “This infirmary has what’s needed to treat this. I’m just here for a few days to get treated and relax.” She lowered her shirt. “Why don’t you come with me when it’s healed?”

Her way of thinking unsettled Rotor. She committed a crime worth a century-long sentence just to get a wound treated? And expected to get out in days? He scooted away from her. “Let’s not get to know each other.”

“Really? Because I need a hunter for my crew. I’m going to the center of time. I’m going to kill the Godhead.”

Rotor blinked at her. “You must have brain damage,” he said.

He had met people who ventured into dense time, of course. That was where the Chiefs of Chiefs and the Shaman Kings acquired the spirits’ blessings that gave them their power. But those were the blessings of small spirits, inhabiting the shallower rings of dense time, nowhere near the center where the Godhead lived. And even that was an outlandish ambition. If just anyone could do it, there would be political upheaval every few years as new challengers returned with powerful blessings.

Stranger still, _kill_ the Godhead? Not ask it for power, but kill it?

“Well,” Mai said, “when I leave I’ll ask you again.”

But Rotor wouldn’t be there when she left a century later, because when he stepped into the front courtyard he saw the warden waiting for him. It was release time.

There wasn’t much to it. The warden, a tall and broad-shouldered man with forearms the girth of Rotor’s thighs, gave him the clothes he’d been wearing when he came, which surprisingly still fit, plus a bag of nuts and a water sack, and let him walk out.

For the first time in memory, he was free of the metallic odor that came from the poop pit behind the prison. The breeze carried salt from the ocean and the scent of pines.

He set out under the moonlight, which was enough if he stayed out of the woods, and with each hour of the journey, as he got closer to the central region, memories returned. The girl he’d been trying to remember was a cartographer, and she smelled like the bitter plants she smoked while she worked. Their home village lay in a deep valley larger animals never went to, so children could roam on their own. These were the images passing through his mind when he fell asleep in a small cave the first night of his trek home.

But when he woke up, he was in a bed. In the lighthouse prison. _His_ bed.

He sat straight up. Sitting across from him at the edge of the opposite bed was the warden, laughing, wiping a tear from his eye.

“I’m sorry,” the warden said. “It’s impolite to laugh.”

“Why am I here again?” Judging by the way his head ached, he’d been sedated. Which meant the bag of nuts he’d been given…

“You see, Rotor, we’ve been paying attention. The way you fold the uniforms, it’s a northern style of folding.”

“It’s a central style,” Rotor said immediately. But why did this matter?

“Perhaps. But it’s not a southern style, and we find this concerning. So after letting you go we reported our concerns about your loyalty to the Shaman King, and together we decided to extend your sentence by ninety years to allow for a more complete reeducation.”

Mai, two beds to the right, started laughing when she heard this.

“My term is over,” Rotor said, standing up. He approached the warden, and several guards emerged from seemingly nowhere with spears lowered at him. “I’m owed freedom now.”

The warden smiled. “How about I show you the way we fold laundry in the south, so that this doesn’t happen again?”

Mai asked, “Do you want my help now, Rotor? Just say you’ll be my hunter, and I’ll take care of everything.”

Rotor raised a palm at her while still looking at the warden. “Stay out of this.”

When Rotor noticed a guard in his peripheral vision look away, he snatched the guard’s spear and pressed the tip against the underside of the warden’s chin. In response, the rest of the guards pressed their spear tips against Rotor’s neck. Any movement on his part would be fatal.

“I would lower that spear if I were you,” the warden said. “I’m adding a decade for every second you don’t.”

One, two, three, four seconds. Then the anger drained from Rotor’s body, and he lowered the spear. In one moment he’d cost himself forty years. But more distressing than that, he had something inside himself that would do it again. The probability he could go one-hundred-and-forty years without making another mistake like this was zero. Because of his inability to control his anger, he would never leave this lighthouse.

The guards carried him to the isolation room and chained his wrists and ankles to the wall, then left him there.

At lunch and dinner, a guard wearing a full face mask came in with a bowl of chowder and a spoon to feed him, which they did violently and may have dislodged one of his rear teeth. It stung sharply every few seconds.

After dark, another masked guard came in.

“There’s no more meals,” Rotor said. “What are you here for?”

But the guard said nothing, only stepped closer, and closer, which given that Rotor could not move his arms or legs made him fear the guard carried some unspeakable intention.

Eventually the guard was up against the wall beside him, and whispered in his ear. “Will you be my hunter now?”

It was Mai, in a stolen guard’s uniform.

“Would you leave me alone?”

“I heard them say you’d be in here for a year. I wonder if your muscles will still work by then. Maybe they’ll spit in your food and feed it to you. Or worse.”

The mere suggestion triggered Rotor’s nausea.

As crazy as this woman was, she seemed to be his only friend, and only company. So he may as well humor her. “Why do you want to kill the Godhead?” he said.

She pinched the skin on his neck with her fingernails until he shouted at her to stop. “See that?” she said. “That’s because of the Godhead.”

“What?”

“Why should my consciousness be able to control the experience of yours? It’s because the Godhead sets rules, creates a physics. Before the Godhead, we controlled ourselves.”

She may be too far gone to humor, actually. Rotor was unsure how to respond for a while, so Mai sat down beside him and leaned against the wall.

“Okay,” Rotor said finally. “I’ll be your hunter.”

Mai jumped up, her face bright. “Truly?”

“I—yes.”

She grabbed the metal cuffs that bound his wrists to the wall and pulled them apart. The metal tore like paper in her hands, and the edges of the tear became red hot, then his wrists were free. She tore apart the ones around his ankles too, and he stepped into the middle of the room to look back at the damage.

“What are you?” he said.

“I have the blessing of the mammoth bear.”

That was an ancient spirit, from very deep in time. How had this woman, who was only thirty, earned its respect? Or even found it?

“No,” she said, seeming to guess Rotor’s train of thought. “I’ve never been to dense time.”

But that only raised more questions.

Mai led him out of the isolation room, to the main hall, and kicked the prison’s front door open. The wooden boards flew forward off their hinges and knocked the night guards to the ground, where they struggled to get out from under the heavy door.

Only one guard was left standing, to their left. Mai hit him his chest the base of her palm and he flew until he hid the perimeter wall.

Just like that, simply, they walked out. Behind them, the other prisoners hurried out through the path they’d created and dispersed.

“Onward to the center of time!” Mai said.

“Wait. There’s someone I need to see first.”

“Where?”

“A valley village in the central region.”

Mai smiled. “Perfect. That’s on the way.”