wanted him for decades. Now we’ll never have justice; all we’ve got is revenge.”
Thorn sat quiet then, thinking about justice and revenge, and why one was so right and the other so wrong, when they brought about the same result. “Who did it?” she asked at last.
“If I knew I’d track him down,” Hunter said darkly.
He started back up the stairs with his coffee, and she had to move aside for him. “Hunter, why do you care so much about such an old crime?” she asked. “There are so many bad things going on today that need fixing.”
He looked at her with a tight, unyielding expression. “To forget is to condone,” he said. “Evil must know it will pay. No matter how long it takes.”
“He’s such a phony,” she said to Magister Pregaldin the next day.
She had returned to his apartment that morning to find everything as usual, except for a half-unpacked crate of new artworks in the middle of the living room. They had sat down to resume lessons as if nothing had changed, but neither of them could concentrate on differential equations. So Thorn told him about her conversation with Hunter.
“What really made him mad was that someone beat him,” Thorn said. “It’s not really about justice, it’s about competition. He wants the glory of having bagged a notorious Gminta. That’s why it has to be public. I guess that’s the difference between justice and revenge: when it’s justice somebody gets the credit.”
Magister Pregaldin had been listening thoughtfully; now he said, “You are far too cynical for someone your age.”
“Well, people are disappointing!” Thorn said.
“Yes, but they are also complicated. I would wager there is something about him you do not know. It is the only thing we can ever say about people with absolute certainty: that we don’t know the whole story.”
It struck Thorn that what he said was truer of him than of Hunter.
He rose from the table and said, “I want to give you a gift, Thorn. We’ll call it our lesson for the day.”
Intrigued, she followed him into his bedroom. He took the rug off the freezer and checked the temperature, then unplugged it. He then took a small two-wheeled dolly from a corner and tipped the freezer onto it.
“You’re giving me the ice owl?” Thorn said in astonishment.
“Yes. It is better for you to have it; you are more likely than I to meet someone else with another one. All you have to do is keep it cold. Can you do that?”
“Yes!” Thorn said eagerly. She had never owned something precious, something unique. She had never even had a pet. She was awed by the fact that Magister Pregaldin would give her something he obviously prized so much. “No one has ever trusted me like this,” she said.
“Well, you have trusted me,” he murmured without looking. “I need to return some of the burden.”
He helped her get it down the steps. Once onto the street, she was able to wheel it by herself. But before leaving, she threw her arms giddily around her tutor and said, “Thank you, Magister! You’re the best teacher I’ve ever had.”
Wheeling the freezer through the alley, she attracted the attention of some young Wasters lounging in front of a betel parlor, who called out loudly to ask if she had a private stash of beer in there, and if they could have some. When she scowled and didn’t answer they laughed and called her a lush. By the time she got home, her exaltation had been jostled aside by disgust and fury at the place where she lived. She managed to wrestle the freezer up the stoop and over the threshold into the kitchen, but when she faced the narrow spiral stair, she knew this was as far as she could get without help. The kitchen was already crowded, and the only place she could fit the freezer in was under the table. As she was shoving it against the wall, Maya came down the stairs and said, “What are you doing?”
“I have to keep this freezer here,” Thorn said.
“You can’t put it there. It’s not convenient.”
“Will you help me carry it up to my room?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I didn’t think so. Then it’s got to stay here.”
Maya rolled her eyes at the irrational acts of teenagers. Now Thorn was angry at her, too. “It has to stay plugged in,” Thorn said strictly. “Do you think you can remember that?”
“What’s in it?”
Thorn would have enjoyed telling her if she hadn’t been angry. “A science experiment,” she said curtly.
“Oh, I see. None of my business, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. It’s a secret,” Maya said in a playful tone, as if she were talking to a child. She reached out to tousle Thorn’s hair, but Thorn knocked her hand away and left, taking the stairs two at a time.
In her room, Thorn gave way to rage at her unsatisfactory life. She didn’t want to be a Waster anymore. She wanted to live in a house where she could have things of her own, not squat in a boyfriend’s place, always one quarrel away from eviction. She wanted a life she could control. Most of all, she wanted to leave the Waste. She went to the window and looked down at the rusty ghetto below. Cynicism hung miasmatic over it, defiling everything noble and pure. The decadent sophistication left nothing unstained.
During dinner, Maya and Hunter were cross and sarcastic with each other, and Hunter ended up storming off into his office. Thorn went to her room and studied Magister Pregaldin’s secret charts till the house was silent below. Then she crept down to the kitchen to check on the freezer. The temperature gauge was reassuringly low. She sat on the brick floor with her back to it, its gentle hum soothing against her spine, feeling a kinship with the owl inside. She envied it for its isolation from the dirty world. Packed away safe in ice, it was the one thing that would never grow up, never lose its innocence. One day it would come alive and erupt in glorious joy—but only if she could protect it. Even if she couldn’t protect herself, there was still something she could keep safe.
As she sat there, The Note came, filling the air full and ringing through her body like a benediction. It seemed to be answering her unfocused yearning, as if the believers were right, and there really were a force looking over her, as she looked over the owl.
When she next came to Magister Pregaldin’s apartment, he was busy filling the crate up again with treasures. Thorn helped him wrap artworks in packing material as he told her which planet each one came from. “Where are you sending them?” she asked.
“Offworld,” he answered vaguely.
Together they lifted the lid onto the crate, and only then did Thorn see the shipping label that had brought it here. It was stamped with a burning red sword—the customs mark of the city-state Flaming Sword of Righteousness. “Is that where you were?” she said.
“Yes.”
She was about to blurt out that Hunter’s Gminta had been murdered there when a terrible thought seized her: What if he already knew? What if it were no coincidence?
They sat down to lessons under the head of the copper-horned beast, but Thorn was distracted. She kept looking at her tutor’s large hands, so gentle when he handled his art, and wondering if they could be the hands of an assassin.
That night Hunter went out and Maya barricaded herself in her room, leaving Thorn the run of the house. She instantly let herself into Hunter’s office to search for a list of Gmintas killed and brought to justice over the years. When she tried to access his files, she found they were heavily protected by password and encryption—and if she knew his personality, he probably had intrusion detectors set. So she turned again to his library of books on the Holocide. The information was scattered and fragmentary, but after a few hours she had pieced together a list of seven mysterious murders on five planets that seemed to be revenge slayings.
Up in her room again, she took out her replica of one of Magister Pregaldin’s charts, the one that looked most like a tracking chart. She started by assuming that the geometric shapes meant planets and the symbols represented individual Gmintas he had been following. After an hour she gave it up—not because she couldn’t make it match, but because she could never prove it. A chart for tracking Gmintas would look identical to a chart for tracking artworks. It was the perfect cover story.
She was still awake when Hunter returned. As she listened to his footsteps she thought of going downstairs and telling him of her suspicions. But uncertainty kept her in bed, restless and wondering what was the right thing to do.
There were riots in the city the next day. In the streets far above the Waste, angry mobs flowed, a turbulent
