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My eyes flicker over to Lucas. He looks to the distance, studying the patterns in the carpet.

The Ambassador smiles at me. “It’s a shame, you know. What happened to the Padre. After so many years of service to the people.”

She leans close. I smell perfume and sweat and stale air.

I pull back, a reflex. “He never did anything.”

“He had something of mine, something very important. He should have known better.”

I want to vomit. Instead, I spit the words out at her. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone.”

She laughs. “Not you, child. Though hiding you from me, that was also very, very ill advised.”

I flush at her laughter.

“I’m talking about something else. My soldiers have ripped apart your little Mission, stone by stone, trying to find it for me.”

“What?” I try not to look at her. I stare straight ahead at a speck on the wall. My heart is pounding.

“It’s a book.” She says it, clipped and precise.

No
—

“About people like you and my son.”

No, no, no
—

“There isn’t another like it, not anywhere in the world. It was taken from me a long time ago, and I would very much like to have it back.”

That stupid, damn book.
What did it say? What did he want me to know?
Why does she want it? Where is it now?

I allow myself to look at her.

Once.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen a book like that.”

She leans closer. “Think about it, Doloria. Take all the time you need. I believe you just might remember.”

She presses the necklace into my hand, hard, and releases me. My fingers close around it and I want to run, sobbing, out of her office. I want to scream and cry and heave everything off the top of her polished desk with both hands.

I don’t.

I take my mother’s necklace and back away. Leaving Lucas, leaving the Ambassador, leaving the Brass Wings Man and the Silent Cities behind. I feel like I will hyperventilate, but I don’t.

I understand.

“Dol, wait!” Lucas calls after me. But I know better than to stop. He lied. I shouldn’t have trusted him. He can’t protect me.

I’m not Lucas Amare.

I’m not the golden child of the Ambassador.

I’m just an orphaned Grassgirl, here to be used and discarded, like her Padre, like her parents, like everyone else on the planet.

The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled
Icon Children Exist!
Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.

Text-scan translation follows.

The moment I leave the Ambassador’s office, four Sympa guards descend on me.

They’re in front of me, behind me, on all sides. They jostle and push, closer and closer, until I can feel the warmth of their sweat and their breath and their adrenaline and fear and I can’t breathe.

The Sympas carry me into a hall with buzzing, bare bulbs and rows of gray, sealed plexi-doors. Everything is locked. Everything is meant to intimidate.

I am shoved into a small, plain room with a small, plain table and two gray chairs. The walls are reflective—of me, of nothing, the nothing in the room.

I am alone.

It hits me that I can’t do or say anything to get myself
out of this mess, while the Embassy can say or do whatever they like, as long as they have me here. I don’t know why this is surprising.

That I am powerless, as always.

I unclench my hand to see the tiny gold cross and the fragile chain.

My mother.

First my family, then the Padre. I wonder if I am only alive, as the Ambassador says, to pay for their deaths.

I drop the necklace on the metal table in front of me.

Here, now, where I have no one, I am overwhelmed by my feelings for my parents—for my mother.

The hundreds and thousands of losses, the things that will never happen between us, writhe around the little cross, around me—until the entire room is full of them.

I see the baby, howling in the crib. My mother, looking up as the radio falls silent. My father, rolling down the stairs.

I close my eyes but I see them still. I can’t stop seeing them. My memories have overtaken me; I can’t push them down, no matter how hard I try. Not now. Now they’re pushing me back—and I feel myself breaking.

I go to the door and begin to pound. I don’t stop until the sides of my hands are sore and bruised and my throat is hoarse from screaming.

You can’t do this to me You can’t treat me like this
I didn’t do anything to you I’m a human being

The rush of words comes loose from me. I don’t know what I say, only what I feel.

The plexi slides open beneath my fists and I find myself pounding at the Colonel. His bald head gleams under the harsh lighting, and for a moment, the jagged scar encircling his head looks like a black halo.

“It’s not necessary to scream. These rooms are wired. We can hear you perfectly clearly, if you use your normal speaking voice.”

I stare at him blankly. The rooms are wired.

“I wanted to yell.” It’s all I can manage to spit out. It doesn’t sound like me, but I don’t feel like myself, either.

I’m too angry.

“Well, that’s fine, then. Useful data, which is of course why we’re here today. I hope you will cooperate.” He looks at me meaningfully.

“Useful data? What are you talking about?” I glare uncooperatively.

“Please, have a seat. There’s no reason to exert yourself. We’ve quite enough data on you, as it is. Thanks to that little display.”

I want to throw the chair at him, but instead I sit in it.

“My name is Colonel Catallus. I am the Chief Security Officer, Advisor to the Ambassador.”

Chief Sympa thug
, I think.

“I will be conducting your inquiry.” The man holds up some kind of sleek tablet, waving it in front of me. “Just a digi-text. Not a torture device.” He smiles and his teeth are artificially white, white as bone. “Now. Tell me about your mother. What little you know. Since she seems to be the trigger.”

I frown. “Trigger?”

I don’t like the way he talks. I don’t like his face, either, so I look at his jacket, covered with military emblems. Medals. Stars. Again, the pair of small brass wings.

“All emotional states have triggers. We pull the trigger and you fire. That’s how this works.”

He smiles, but it’s not meant to make me feel any better. He wants something—I just can’t tell what.

Not yet.

I stare at the wings for what feels like an eternity before I respond. “I’m not a gun.”

“I didn’t say you were.” He smiles.

“I don’t have a trigger.”

“All right. You don’t believe you do; that’s useful too.” He smiles again, tapping on his digi-text, and I want to punch him in the face. “Let’s talk about your necklace.”

The necklace. I stuff it in my pocket. “No.”

“It was very kind of the Ambassador to arrange for you to have it, don’t you think?”

I say nothing.

“You lost both your parents on The Day. I see that in your file. And this.”

He flips his digi-text toward me. There, in the ten inches between his hands, he holds a photograph of my home.

Of what used to be my home.

In what used to be my neighborhood.

I have seen photographs of this room. Pictures of large hands holding a small me in the water, a dark-haired, pink-skinned naked baby who looked more like a frog. In this picture, though, there is no baby. No rubber duck. There are no people at all, at least not where you can see them.

I can only see the edge of the tarp covering the bodies if I look very closely at the black patch at the bottom of the frame. It almost blends in with the dark pattern on the torn blue wallpaper.

I look away.

My eyes fill with tears and I hate myself for giving in to them. They burn as they slide down my face.

“It’s your home, isn’t it? Where you lived with your mother and your father?”

“And my brothers,” I say automatically. Before I can stop myself.

Colonel Catallus smiles broadly, so I know I must have said something wrong.

“Of course. You had two brothers, correct? Pepi and…”

“Angel,” I say, closing my eyes. I can see them, their dirty knees and their uncut hair from the photographs, but I can’t see their faces. Not anymore. Where they should have faces they only have blank, black shadows. Same as the shadow over their heads, over our house, over our city. Same as the shadow over the world, the one that settled upon us one day and never left.

The shadows overwhelm me. I don’t want to see them anymore. I don’t want to talk about them. I want the Brass Wings Man to stop.

I have to stop him
, I think.

I have to, and I can.

I reconsider the man in front of me. I explore him with my mind, pushing past the coldness that comes when I touch him. There’s a wall of pure ice where there should be something alive inside him, and I search for a crack, anything to let me in.

As I suspected, the ice isn’t real—it’s a facade—and it gives way as soon as I concentrate. One push, and the paper doll his mind has been hiding behind falls like an autumn leaf, a snowflake.

It blows away and I am left with the ugly truth of an ugly mind. An ugly life.

I feel my way up and down and past and through him. He is small and afraid and coiled. He is slippery and beige. Inside him, when I reach all the way inside, there is nothing. An empty space with a small pebble rolling around,
making a rattling noise where there should have been something else.

A heart. A soul. There is nothing.

Except, now, me.

“What are you doing?” He sounds surprised.

I don’t answer.

“Doloria.” His voice is a warning, but I don’t stop. I am doing things I have never done before. I’ve found a new weapon, and I want to use it. I want to hurt him with it.

I see the faces of his dead mother and father. His cats. He smuggles them soft food from the Blackhole Market.

A bottle of strong drink. An empty chair.

There’s more.
Come on. Show me
, I think.
I want to see it all.
And then I do.

“Enough!”

I open my eyes.

“There was a girl. You let her die. Why?”

In my mind, I see the face of the dead girl, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, and I can think of nothing else. She didn’t die the way the Padre did. Quietly, in a chapel. Someone didn’t just take away the beating of her heart. Someone hurt her, on purpose. To make her scream. To be cruel.

He did. This man. He likes to hurt people, in ways I do not want to imagine. I’ve seen enough already.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He reaches
up with his hand and presses a button on a panel, shutting down the machines in the room and, I’m guessing, cutting us off from the rest of the Embassy.

Anything can happen now. We are alone, in this room. He could kill me if he wanted to. Still, I don’t stop. I can’t.

“Who is she? A Skin? An accident?”

“Nobody,” he says. “Nothing.”

“Like me?”

The brass wings glint as Colonel Catallus stands. He is white with rage, shaking so much he almost can’t make the words come out.

“Stop right now, Doloria. I’m not an Icon Child. I’m not the one being studied, here.” He takes a breath and smiles with his teeth. That’s what he does with his anger, Colonel Catallus. He smiles. “If you get in my way, I’ll kill you. I have no problem with that.”

Inwardly, I shiver—because I know he speaks the truth. But I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “Like you killed the Padre.”

“You have many triggers, Doloria Maria de la Cruz. But don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find them all. One way or another.” His mouth twitches.
Please don’t smile
, I think. “It’ll be a fun game for us, won’t it?”

I stare at him.

He sits forward, raising his voice. “Now get out of my mind.”

“Make me.”

“Get out. You can’t treat me like this. I’m a human being.” For a moment, he catches me off guard. Then I realize he’s mocking me. He’s saying the words I said, or something like them.

“Stop.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know what you think you saw, Doloria, but you will never speak of those things again.”

“Or what,” I say evenly.

Colonel Catallus smiles again, and I want to scream. He presses a button at the side of the plexi-door. The wall facing me slides upward, and I see that it is no wall at all but a window.

On the other side of the window is Ro.