Some books had been bought during cease-fires. Before the Rising destroyed the idea of bookstores. A few had come from his grandparents, who had returned to the Southern Isles when he was ten. Memories of them were like spent matches dull against a sudden darkness. He leafed through the books for signs of them sometimes. A folded letter. A note that never dropped to the floor.

But most of the books had been his father’s, rescued from the old home. About a dozen Finch knew from long repetition, part of his father’s home-schooling when it was too dangerous to go to class.

His father had started out as a brilliant engineer. In his youth, he had served in the Ambergris military in that brief, bright window when they’d taken on the Kalif’s empire. He was with the troops as they advanced into a desert strewn with oases and hunched trees with gnarled black branches. As they took the Kalif’s lands, and contemplated their own vision of conquest. As they were pushed back.

With Finch’s mother dead in childbirth, his father had raised him after the war. A strange life, seesawing between wealth and poverty. Father’s many impor- tant yet strange friends. His connections with Hoegbotton & Sons. And yet sometimes things had been bad enough Finch’s father had supported them doing odd jobs and trading books for food. Or burning books for fuel.

Back at the old house, there had been many photographs of his father. The broad-chested muscular form of the man, tight in that characteristic Ambergrisian uniform of olive green. Wedge of a hat tilted to the side as was the fashion. On a hill or in a city or atop a tank. Surrounded by fellow soldiers or alone. Always smiling. Eyes dark dots looking into the camera. Seeming aware of future fame, but not of how it would come. Nor of how far he would fall.

Finch had chosen “John” for his new identity because it was his father’s name. “Finch” was just a common bird, a creature no one would ever notice. He’d burned all photographs except one the night he’d changed his name. Displayed on the mantel, it showed his grandparents just arrived from the Southern Isles. At the docks with their suitcases beside them. Looking faded, remote, and confused. Grandpa had been a carpenter. Grandma a homemaker. There were no relatives on his mother’s side. His father was four years old in the photo. This image was all Finch was willing to risk.

Once, Sintra had asked about the people in the photo. He’d said he didn’t know them. That he’d found the photo on the street and liked it. True, to a point. Hadn’t known the four-year-old. Never really knew his grandparents. Just another nonmemory from a lost life, and most days he didn’t regret that.