It was early afternoon when Lloyd and his companions sputtered to a halt at their hiding spot. Lloyd always kept the rejected Desian hovercraft out of sight, in case its previous owners decided it provided their human inferiors with too much power. Freedom of movement, Lloyd discovered, was an infinitely liberating advantage, and he would do all he could to keep that advantage. He'd made sure not many of the townspeople knew about their little vehicle, since everyone around those parts seemed to have an odd propensity for theft. Even Lloyd, but he made a point to steal from only Desians, and of course, the dead.

He hauled his bag of pilfered goods out of the storage compartment of the hovercraft and tossed it over his shoulder. After he helped Ezra and Barra throw a sand-colored tarp over the vehicle, they turned toward Triet. The city was still a few miles away, since Lloyd had insisted they keep their mechanical treasure hidden far away from prying eyes. But the walk back was certainly less grueling than it would've been had they stomped all the way back from the ruins, weighed down by their collection of statuettes and other items.

"Why did I get the writing utensils?" Ezra whined. "I can't even write."

"You foist them on a passing scribe from the Church," Lloyd said. They were known to be ignorant and carry lots of unnecessary cash. "I can take those things off your hands if you want."

"Or me," Barra said. "Those little buggers are gold-trimmed and old as Efreet himself. I'll trade you for 'em."

"No. I'm all right." Ezra often just looked for excuses to complain on their long, quiet trips, perhaps simply for the conversation.

They got back to Triet well before the sun set. Ezra was greeted in the square by his host of younger siblings, and while he was trying to keep them from grabbing his hard-earned loot, Lloyd and Barra strolled past the bazaar toward their respective homes. Barra was one of the luckier citizens who had accumulated enough wealth to build himself a small stone house, seated—as they all were—partway underground. Lloyd and his mother had to make do with a tent on the edge of town, partitioned into a living and sleeping space, floored with ratty, second-hand rugs. Lloyd did not mind his living situation. Although privacy was hard to maintain in such lodging, they had amenities that few people could boast of. His hand-made electric stove, for example.

It was infinitely better than the ranch had ever been. His standards had not been high when his mother carried him, exhausted, into town and begged for a place to stay. No one had given in to her desperate pleas, so she rested in the shadows of the inn, cradling her son and protecting him against the harsh cold that saturated the desert nights. Lloyd didn't really care about the cold, or the sand in his eyes, or the uncomfortable rocks under his body. His mother was close, and when the chilly air and sandy wind prevented them from getting any decent sleep, he stared up at the stars and she told him stories about them all night long.

Barra had found them in the morning on his way out of town. He canceled his trip and sold them his old tent for cheap, helping them set it up and get settled in. They still hadn't managed to pay off their debt to him, but they had since learned that Barra was the sort of man who didn't care. He took them both under his wing regardless, and lent a helping hand when Lloyd found it difficult to adjust to the world outside the human ranch.

Anna taught him many things—which stars were which and what stories lay behind them, the names and tastes of all the fruits and vegetables at the bazaar, how to properly address people by their names and titles (real names! He thought the name girl from the ranch would get a kick out of his situation now), what a home was, in concept and in practice. She taught him how to properly stroke a cat, how to tickle a goat under its chin, how to tell if fruit was ripe to eat, how to greet other children. He had learned how to play with them on his own. It was a slow, awkward process, but when he was smaller he'd let Ezra take the lead and show the weird boy from far away how games were played in Triet.

Barra taught him just as much: how to survive in the desert for weeks at a time, where to find water, which townspeople to avoid, which were friendly. He taught him the history of the area (as far as he could recall), and how to avoid getting swindled. He tried to teach him traditional Trieti knife fighting, but gave up when Lloyd insisted he carry two knives to double his power, which drove his form to hell.

He taught both Anna and Lloyd native Trieti, an ancient and complex language that she grasped right away but Lloyd had a fair bit of trouble with. Only a few people, usually the old ones, communicated exclusively in old Trieti. Most people spoke a dialect shared with the cities of Palmacosta, Asgard, Hima, and at one point, Iselia. Word was that Iselia no longer existed—that its people had scattered and the Chosen had been murdered in her bed by the Desian horde. Once in a while a stranger passing through Triet claimed to be from Iselia, but none of them had much to say about the fate of the town.

Lloyd wasn't allowed to say he had passed through it once. He wasn't allowed to say any things regarding the past, apart from the script his mother had fed him over and over when they first arrived. They were from Hima. She lost her arm in a coal processing accident. They had never been to Iselia, they had never been to a human ranch. It wasn't hard for Lloyd to hide his number tattoo, but he still had to make sure that nobody caught a stray glimpse of the bottom of his foot when he changed his shoes. His mother's tattoo had been inscribed on her left arm, so she had no marks to hide—apart, of course, from her obvious missing limb. But there were many reasons a woman might have a missing arm; there was only one for her to have a number tattoo.

Lloyd had not been sad to see his old life go. Sometimes he stayed awake, thinking of the other children that never made it out, but the thoughts would come and go on the wind and he would have to focus on more important things, like trying to act like a normal human being. At first, he found it tremendously difficult to adjust to the concepts of unrestricted movement, free time, healthy meals, and some degree of privacy. The sights and sounds and abstract ideas of the outside world all both fascinated and terrified him, and in his early years, when things got too complex for him, he'd shut down for hours at a time, just staring at nothing until his mother coaxed him back into reality.

She would try to shower him with little comforts to prevent these episodes. Since Lloyd was unaware of his birthday (and even unfamiliar with the concept of a birthday), she decided to let him choose his own. She brought out a calendar and showed him how dates and years were kept and sorted. She told him about holidays and feasting days, how the moon swelled and disappeared like a living thing, how the seasons worked. In Triet, there were few year-round changes in weather, but there were still seasonal feasts—those were his favorite days. He thought about it for a while, and decided to place his birthday as far away from the feasts as possible. Anna had thought it an interesting choice, but he told her in so many eight-year-old words that he wanted to minimize the consecutive days where celebrations were absent.

"I was impressed with you, I confess," she'd told him recently, when recalling the event. "Knowing that you'd grown up in an environment like a human ranch, I sort of expected you to turn out… you know, simple."

"If you'd wanted me to turn out simple, I would've done it," Lloyd had replied.

"I'd love you either way."

Lloyd was simple, at first. He had a hard time understanding which actions were appropriate and which were not, when he was free to roam and when he wasn't, and other fundamentals that other children had long since mastered. He especially struggled with unspoken rules and abstract societal constructions.

Money had been one of the most difficult concepts for him to grasp. His mother had taken a job as a fruit seller to pay off what she owed Barra for the tent, and when she brought home her first handful of coins, Lloyd had found them meaningless. When she tried to explain to him the idea that these useless disks were used in trade, he only laughed. He looked the tiny metals over and concluded that they were worthless, that you could arguably complete a circuit with one but risk an electrical fire. He knew enough about all the metals used in Desian ranches to know these ones weren't exactly useful material.

His mother insisted that he could trade these for all sorts of things—food, clothes, lodging, drinks, other metals for building things, transportation. He was so stubborn that he did not relent his position until she personally took him to the market and bought him a new pair of shoes with only a few of those coins. From then on, the idea began to sink in. And when it did, he latched onto it like a leech.

The notion that so much power could be held in the palm of his hand amazed him. He had become some sort of alchemist, able to turn these tiny coins into fruit or clothing or whatever he needed. The possibilities for him were endless, and he began to collect the little metal disks wherever he could. Unfortunately, even though the idea of money had grown on him, the idea of property had not, and when he was caught taking a coin purse unabashedly from a stranger's waistband, his mother dragged him home and taught him a valuable lesson about the concept of ownership.

After nearly a decade living in Triet, he still stumbled through the occasional social faux pas, but he had the general grasp of what constituted a society. It was a crude, undeniably Trieti definition of society, but by his late teens he'd managed to navigate the complexities of citizenship and live as normally as he ever could.

It was afternoons like this one, when he walked through town and found he wasn't afraid of everything anymore, that made him realize how far he'd come.

"Are you gonna pop by for a meal later?" he asked Barra.

"Not tonight, no. My cousin is passing through and I promised him I'd give him ample lodging and a meal he wouldn't forget. Now I'm gonna be stuck at home cooking all night."

Lloyd laughed. "He won't forget that meal all right. It'll make him gag for years to come."

"Shut up and go home, boy."

Lloyd waved him a good afternoon and made his way across the curving dirt path to where his tent stood, edges frayed and swaying in the wind. One of the stones that held down the side flap had rolled off, so he replaced it before entering.

"Elá maruh bari." It was an old Trieti greeting along the lines of "Mother, I'm home," that children often used, but Lloyd continued utilizing it well past the age when most kids outgrew it.

His mother sat bent over her tiny electric stove, cooking something spicy. "Bulanoharan, ahmun." She rehearsed her reply and stood, arm-and-a-half spread wide, folding him into her embrace. "I see you've come back alive from your adventures. An unexpected surprise."

"We found lots of interesting things," Lloyd started, seating himself on a moth-eaten pillow and opening his bag. "I brought you something." He fished out the statue of the woman and handed it to her.

She took a long look at it, a dozen complicated expressions passing over her face. "This is… quaint. I take it you didn't read the inscription at the bottom."

She didn't need to tease him like that. Everyone knew Lloyd couldn't read.

"What does it say? Something pretty, I hope."

"It's an old mantra in Efreet worship. To help a woman through the birthing process." He didn't ask how she knew such things. She had read so much about the various religions and ancient artifacts and supernatural beings of Triet, it seemed she could pull facts out of thin air.

"Oh," was all Lloyd had to say about that.

"I like it," she said. "Look at the stone fire at her feet. It's actually quite beautiful. Disturbing, but beautiful." He grinned at her crookedly, and she mirrored his smile. "One day when you're older and father children, you'll understand why hellfire is symbolic of childbirth." She put the statuette on their one low table, beside the collection of others he had gifted to her over the years.

Lloyd lay back on his pillow, setting aside the rest of the treasure for later sorting. "The food won't be ready in a while," his mother said. "I got a little less today than usual, but you'll live."

"I don't think I will." He reached behind him, in the mess of old pillows where he usually kept his oud, took it out and began to play. Learning an instrument of some sort had been his mother's idea. She had an abundance of natural talent for any artistic expression, but music was one of her strongest inclinations. When she brought him home a shoddy, out-of-tune oud for his twelfth birthday, she had been twice as pleased with it than he had. At first he had not understood the function of the instrument. But she had sung enough songs to him since they had reunited that he had a good grasp of a beat and knew that music itself had many purposes.

Unfortunately, Anna had only one hand, and although she used to be decent at guitar and lyre, she couldn't teach him too much about the oud. There were no music instructors in Triet, so she had to figure out how to tune the thing and show him how to hold down a string. She leaned over him and would use her strong fingers to pin the string to the correct place, instructing him when to strum and how. Eventually he got familiar enough with the workings of the instrument to figure everything out. From then on, he didn't go a day without playing it.

He always liked to accompany her as she sat at the stove and sang. She would cycle through all the songs she had sung to him in childhood, all the songs she had learned abroad as she traveled, all the drinking ditties of Palmacostan sailors and the operatic love songs she had learned when she was leading lady at a theater in the big city.

His fingers followed her smooth, deep voice along the melody lines of a few songs, until his stomach rumbled so much he had to sing a different tune.

He strummed out the simple melody line of a familiar song. "When will dinner be ready, mother mine?" he sang morosely.

"It will be ready when my son shuts his mouth," Anna sang back, smiling.

"When will your son shut his mouth, mother mine?" His fingers played with a few trills.

"Not until the world ends, and the sky goes dark."

"When will the world end, mother mine?"

"In about twenty minutes."

Lloyd used to have plenty of dreams about the ranch, especially when they first arrived in Triet. He would wake up in his cot, wander through the monotonous events of the day, go back to bed, wake up again, go through another day, then wake up for real and not know where he was. But his mother was always beside him, holding him when he cried, assuring him that this was the real world, and that the ranch had been a dream. She had to tell him over and over that they weren't going back there, ever. He wanted to believe her, but it took him months to finally let go of the fear that he would wake up back in his old cot, surrounded by the ghosts of dead children and the withered, wasting bodies of living ones.

He dreamt of Forcystus, and Kvar, of his mother dressed as a medical assistant, he dreamt of the dark corners of the ranch's inner walls, he dreamt of rats and electrical sockets and wiring and wrenches. He dreamt of the dead boy and his symbols. He dreamt of a vat of bleach, soaked with red, and the overwhelming, ferrous smell of blood and ammonia. It took years for the dreams to go away, but they did. With his mother's help, they did.

She had dreams, too. Sometimes she would wake up sweaty, tangled in her blankets, sometimes she would groan and mutter so furiously Lloyd would have to shake her until she sat up and realized she was in a tent in Triet, far away from her nightmares. On those nights, if Lloyd was lucky, she'd let him stay up with her as she brewed a pot of medicinal tea. She would let him have some, and although it tasted bitter and made him sleepy, he liked sharing a cup with her.

One day, a few months after they had settled into their new life, Lloyd mustered the courage to ask her about her nightmares.

"They're about the day I lost my arm," she told him, and for a while he pressed no further. When she kept waking up from the same dream, he decided to ask her a few more questions. He couldn't help but wonder at the way she rubbed her elbow stump, as if trying to massage out a pulled muscle. "Does it hurt?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered.

"How can your arm hurt if it's not there?"

"I don't know, Lloyd. It just… it's strange. It's like my body knows the arm is supposed to be there. It's asking me where my arm is."

"Where is your arm?"

She chuckled a little. "I don't know. I seem to have misplaced it."

It was about a year into the nightmares before he started asking the right questions. "Who cut off your arm, elá?"

She sat silently for a moment, staring at the boiling pot of tea, as if something important were contained inside. She bit her lip before answering, "Your father."

That had been the first time she had mentioned that Lloyd even had a father. The thought had just never occurred to him. His early notions of family were indistinct and abstract—he had no family, no one did, not at the ranch. But at the same time he shared a necessary camaraderie with his fellow imprisoned children that one might define as vaguely familial. The older ones sometimes picked on him, sometimes watched out for him, as he did for his juniors. He had seen Ezra behave that way with his siblings, so he assumed that's the way children in families acted.

But he had never even come across the notion that he may have had a parent until Anna had sat him down in that medical office so long ago and introduced to him the tangible concept of motherhood. He knew that everyone had a mother and father—children who came to the ranch from the outside world often mentioned theirs—but he never knew anyone had a relationship with them. It was extraordinary.

After Anna had first mentioned his father, he began to wonder why the man was suspiciously absent. It was a question Anna could not answer, at least all at once. And at first Lloyd did not dare pressure her. When she let slip bits and pieces of information about his father, he collected them carefully, as one picks up shards of glass from the floor, and stored them in the back of his mind.

He arranged the facts about his father the way he arranged his toolbox: in neatly partitioned areas according to use. He had a memory bank for what his father looked like, one for what his father acted like, one for specific memories his mother had of him, one for her opinions of him.

Here is what he'd collected throughout the years: his father may or may not be dead. His father had eyes like his—a dark, deep brown. His father's hair had been redder than his. His father had been tall, and had carried a sword (one which was later used to separate his mother from her arm, he learned). He had been quiet, had not smiled often, except when Lloyd was around. He had been knowledgable. He had been a kind and loving father. And then he had tried to murder his family.

"Why did he try to kill us?" Lloyd asked her one night, when he was feeling particularly brave. He was thirteen and growing like a weed. He became stronger and more confident by the day.

"I don't know," his mother answered. He thought she looked sad, or relieved. He hadn't been sure. "He had always been so calm. He just… snapped, I suppose. He broke under the pressure."

"What pressure?"

Anna sighed. "That's a long story, Lloyd. I will tell it to you some other time."

That other time never seemed to come. The only information he got with which to build a portrait of his father came in off-hand comments, few and far between, and always with a confusing mix of admiration and disdain—"Your father said this," "He would've liked that," "Who knows what the bastard thought."

One night when he was fifteen, he awoke to the sound of her crying. He opened his eyes and saw her staring at him; evidently she had been watching him sleep. Her eyes were red, her mouth contorted in sorrow. He sat up and looked at her, and she didn't try to hide her tears from him.

"What are you crying for?" he asked.

She shook her head. "You've… just… you look more like him every day."

It shook Lloyd to the bone. He looked down at his folded hands, not sure what to think. He considered what it meant that he could make her cry simply by existing, simply by looking the way he did. He didn't know if she was crying because she hated him, because he reminded her of the man who ruined her life, or because of something else entirely.

"Elá, do you still love him?" he asked carefully.

"How can I, after all he's done to us?" She had been slow to answer. It had not been a no.

He began to hate his father then. He hated him for mutilating her, of course, but he hated him more for forcing Lloyd to remind Anna of him. He was determined to erase his father from his own memory and hers, but he didn't know how. He seemed to be helplessly crushed under the presence of a man who was no longer even there. The shadows his father cast became real to him, and he realized that he was not just an abstract concept, like ownership or money or the gods, but a real human being. A real human being who had hurt his mother, who had tried to kill them both, who had condemned them to live in the ranch for all those years.

Silently, as he comforted his mother in the dim night, he swore that if he ever came across his father again, he would remove the power he still wielded over his family. The next time they met, if ever, Lloyd would kill him.