As soon as she walked into the Tengers’ tent, Asena subconsciously touched the part of her scarf that covered her nose.

In truth, there was nothing about the foul odour inside the tent that was qualitatively distinct from the outside. Rather, everything just felt denser and older, as though the miasma had been trapped and allowed to ferment for far too long.

Twelve years, that old woman in District Radicis had said. Had these people really lived in such deplorable conditions for twelve years? The Shiranui heiress, on the other hand, already had her fill after a mere few minutes.

The woman—whose gender Asena could only ascertain with the aid of foreknowledge—lay curled amidst a mosaic of soiled paper and tattered rags. Of all the ‘corpses’ she’d seen in the Foothills, this one appeared closest to genuine death. The woman’s slight bone-thin frame, her sallow drawn skin, and her sparse brittle hair all combined to make her simultaneously the youngest and oldest person within the settlement.

That was when Asena suddenly understood the source of her earlier perplexity as she watched the crowd: that feeling of something being profoundly wrong about the Foothiller populace. It was that, among the ghosts that had gathered in quiet desperation, there hadn’t been a single child, nor indeed anyone close to Asena’s age.

Presently, Ophis set down his rucksack—considerably lighter than when he’d begun his visit—and knelt beside the living corpse that was Bateer Tenger’s wife. He first inspected the woman with calm practiced eyes before placing a gentle hand upon the bony protuberance that was her shoulder. The woman barely moved.

“Sarnai? How are we today?” The serpent’s voice was as tender as his touch. “We missed you out there. Are you sure you won’t have something to eat?”

The greeting did elicit something of a response. The woman’s eyes widened into hazy slits, and her chapped lips fluttered soundlessly.

Ophis looked over his shoulder, directly at Asena, and beckoned with his head. She froze, completely at a loss as to what was expected of her. Ophis only tilted his head again, more insistently. At this, absurdly enough, an ingrained sense of hierarchy and duty drove Asena to kneel down next to the Gaertner with haste.

“Look, Sarnai, we have a guest with us! I know you’re always up for a chat. Won’t you say hello?”

Ophis pointedly eyed Asena as he spoke, his intentions clear. She hesitated again, until she did the only thing that could offer herself any comfort in the moment: fall back on her training. She was a Kurator, and Sarnai Tenger, at least for now, was her subject.

“How do you do, Mis—Mrs Tenger? My name is Corporal Shiranui, and I’ll be… conducting your interview today. Before we begin, did you have any questions for me?”

The reaction was remarkable—and utterly unexpected. Sarnai’s ears pricked at the first of Asena’s words before a strange spasm ran through the rest of her body. By the time the Kurator had finished rattling off her generic intro, the fading ghost that was her subject planted one trembling arm upon her bed of rotting rags.

Asena reached out instinctively, and together with Ophis, lifted the woman into a sitting position. Sarnai’s body was shockingly light, but far more disturbing were her pair of sunken eyes that now fixed Asena with rapt fascination.

“You…” the woman’s quivering lips produced the faintest of murmurs. “It’s you… isn’t it?”

Only intense sympathy and an abundant sense of goodwill stopped Asena from frowning in response. She didn’t need to have seen Sarnai Tenger in better days to be certain that the two of them had never met. Asena looked to Ophis uncertainly, who only returned his inscrutable smile.

“All these years,” the woman croaked, then somehow summoned the strength to slide closer to her young guest. Her eyes too had lost their earlier haze and now gleamed with the beginning of unmistakable tears. “All these years. Where have you been?”

“I—”

Asena froze again as Sarnai suddenly grabbed her by both arms. The woman’s grip, far stronger than it had any business to be, drew her close, toward a nightmarish face etched and grooved by unimaginable suffering, and into an inescapable cloud of halitosis and decay.

It took Asena every ounce of her resolve not to recoil in horror. She did, however, throw pleading eyes at Ophis, who again only watched the interaction with almost detached interest.

In the end, it was the woman’s husband that stepped in and released the Kurator.

“Leave the poor girl alone, Sarnai,” Bateer chided the woman as he held her back. “And it’s time you put a stop to this nonsense. Look what it’s done to you!”

“Can’t you see?” the woman wailed, struggling in her husband’s arms. “She’s come back to us! This is her. How do you not see?”

“See what? Who do you think this girl is?”

“It’s her! Our daughter!”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? This is her. You are, aren’t you?”

“It’s impossible because we have no daughter.”

Yet, even as he said this, Bateer’s own eyes flooded with tears—with grief as raw as the day he’d forgotten it.

Asena was horrified. She felt somehow responsible for the shared anguish of a couple she’d never met. And because she felt responsible, she also had the ludicrous notion that she was the only one who could save the couple from their plight.

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Slowly, and without clear design behind her actions, she first removed her blue courier’s cap, then lowered her scarf. She braced herself against the fresh assault on her senses and forced her heart to still as she met Sarnai’s scrutiny.

“Do I remind you of someone you know?” she spoke with a placidity that surprised herself. “My name might’ve already given it away, but I’m a daughter of the Shiranui clan. Perhaps you remember seeing me at a Martyr’s Day procession?”

Sarnai stopped struggling at once. Then her eyes glazed over somewhat as she sank back into her makeshift bed. She remained sitting up, however, and her parched lips worked frantically to form her next words.

“My… my apologies, Ms Shiranui. I… must’ve confused you with someone else.”

“See?” Bateer chimed in, with eyes still glistening. “I told you she wasn’t our daughter.”

It didn’t escape Asena’s notice that the man now neglected to deny the existence of said daughter. But she kept her attention on the wife as she put on her best Tetrarch smile.

“Think nothing of it,” she said with manufactured magnanimity, tempered by a hint of cold authority. “Besides, I’m here not to speak about myself, but to learn about you. Are you sure you won’t have some water first? I expect it’ll be a lengthy conversation, and I want you to feel at your best.”

Now that the earlier frenzy had left her, Mrs Tenger simply looked mystified. What was a Shiranui heiress doing in her tent, and what could she possibly want to know about her? Yet her amorphous questions battled for primacy with her very real need for sustenance, and, unsurprisingly, hunger and thirst won out.

Asena proceeded to ‘interview’ Sarnai Tenger as the latter ate and drank from a fresh package Ophis had produced. She made a conscious effort to keep the questions vague and centred on the couple’s life in the Foothills, the details of which turned out to be as grim as she’d feared.

More than once, she wanted—desperately—to bring up Zelen, to ask about the school Bateer used to run. Something told her, however, that such questions wouldn’t yield anything useful, and instead would only further distress the couple. Besides, what she’d already learned through simple observation had given her more than enough to chew on.

Asena and her Gaertner companion eventually said their goodbyes, leaving the Tengers well-fed if a little puzzled. And by the time they ducked out of the tent, the crowd around the scrap mound too had dispersed.

The sky—even without the dome obscuring it—had taken on a purplish hue, indicating imminent nightfall. As if by tacit agreement, Asena and Ophis hiked silently and side by side, back up the river of sewage, with neither having to be led nor prodded at gunpoint.

As they reached the gap in the barrier that led back into the city, Ophis was the first to stop, and Asena promptly followed suit.

“Do you have a place to stay?”

She didn’t, but she also wasn’t ready to entangle herself to the serpent any more than she needed to.

“I’ll manage.”

Ophis nodded, then considered for a moment before adding, “You showed remarkable restraint back there. With the Tengers. I was prepared to intervene at any moment, but it turned out my concern was unwarranted.”

“I’m not a monster. It’s clear for anyone to see that the Tengers have suffered enough, without me having to poke at their wounds.”

Ophis nodded again. “So, you see it too then? The signs of your fellow Kurators’ handiwork.”

Asena winced. Of all the horrors she’d witnessed today, what she found most difficult to cope with was the realization that Kuration had played a central role in the Tengers’—perhaps even all Foothillers’—abject misery.

“That’s what you wanted to show me, isn’t it?” she snapped, made all the unhappier by the defensiveness of her tone. “That’s what your clues and non-answers were leading to?”

“Partly, yes.” Ophis’s utter lack of remorse only added to Asena’s irritation. “But I was rather hoping you could also arrive at the bigger picture.”

“And what picture is that? That there are people living outside the barriers? In squalor. In torment. Under constant threat from the Syntropy…”

“Do you really think, Ms Shiranui,” Ophis cut in, as that insufferable smile crept back onto his visage, “that the Foothillers can afford to pay any mind to the Syntropy?”

Asena frowned. “But the Syntropy are humanity’s biggest threat. The dome is our only line of defense, and only when every last one of our enemies are eradicated would we as a civilization achieve true liberation. That’s what all of this is about. That’s what any of us are fighting for. That’s what Zelen—”

She fell silent, and her mind didn’t need riddles told from a forked tongue to be set ablaze by doubts of her own.

What manner of conviction drove Zelen’s tireless flights into battle? What did he envision beyond the planet’s haze as he faced the same enemy—the same death—for the umpteenth time?

Besides which, what did Asena herself fight for? What did she want to achieve? What hope kept her returning to the workstation at Terminal One, again and again, to stare into the violence in her fiancé’s heart?

“Something tells me you’re finally asking the right questions,” the serpent spoke with his forked tongue. “Yet you and I both know those questions aren’t meant for me. At least not yet.”

“Because the answers to those questions…” Asena murmured as if to herself, “I need to see them for myself. Zelen needs to see them for himself. He knew them once. Then he chose to forget. Because whatever he’d learned was so painful that it was easier to know nothing… to be nothing.”

“Precisely. And yet… we can’t leave it be, can we?”

“In order for Zelen to move forward, he needs to face the truth. Again. But this time, he won’t have to do it alone. I won’t let him do it alone.”

Ophis nodded a third time, then he unslung his rucksack before ducking under the barrier and climbing back onto Akropolis. He then held out a hand, which Asena took after a moment’s hesitation.

“I do have to warn you, Ms Shiranui,” he said with a slight grunt as he helped Asena to her feet. “Your next few sessions with Mr Athelstan will be your most difficult ones yet, provided you’re still asking the right questions.”

“I’ve already seen the worst Zelen’s memories have to offer,” she said quietly as she dusted herself off. “I’m prepared for anything.”

“You might be. But is he?”

Asena tried to read his expression, though in the gathering darkness, the serpent’s smile had become more inscrutable than ever.

“Before I go, Ms Shiranui, I’d like to leave you with my third and final message. And after that… well, I imagine that the next time we meet, you’ll be the one to contact me.”

“But how’s that even possible? You still haven’t told me a thing about you.”

“Rest assured, when the time comes where you can no longer go at it alone… when you’re in need of an ally… I’ll know to come to your aid. Now, Ms Shiranui, about that message?”

Asena stared at Ophis even as his features blended into the night. She nodded.

DEAR DREAMER,

AND NOW, TAKE A BITE