You could close your eyes forever and still never be anywhere but where you had always been. Finch saw his father’s capacity for violence only once. When he was twelve. A hot night. Made so by the rumbling excesses of heavy artillery off to the south. Brown smoke highlighting gouts of orange flame erupting around the silhouettes of buildings. The distant whumping sound of shells and tank retort. House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe engaged in a struggle none yet knew was pointless. The cease-fire hadn’t held.

They’d had to move from their house, gotten caught in a war zone. Finch was hunched down by the window of the third-story apartment they’d taken refuge in. Waiting for his father to return from hours of scavenging for food and other supplies.

The window, with its grimy gray frame, had become a kind of moving painting for Finch. As intense as any zoetrope. Below, Albumuth Boulevard, once one of the richest arteries of trade in the world, had become little more than a mass of rubble and ripped-apart bodies. A day before men and tanks had fought across that landscape, the light red-green at their backs. The moans and screams matched to the cruel intensity of colors. He would watch, unblinking. Sometimes catch glimpses of gray caps running along the periphery.

Behind him, the door burst open.

A sniper with the insignia of House Hoegbotton. Framed by the doorway. Only five years older than Finch. Face already ancient.

“Down on the floor,” the sniper ordered, walking into the living room. He had long, delicate fingers. Golden stubble on his cheeks. Smelled of sweat and gunpowder. “Get under that chair.”

Finch scuttled out of the sniper’s way across the floor. Under the chair as ordered. Watched as the sniper pulled the curtains across the window, opened the pane a crack, and shoved the long, steel muzzle of his automatic rifle through the crack. From Finch’s perspective on the floor, the sniper looked huge. The recoil of the rifle made a dull, satisfying sound. Discarded shells rolled across the floor toward Finch. Touched one. Brought his finger away burned.

The man cursed when he missed. Said nothing when he hit his target.

“Shouldn’t you be in the militia?” the sniper asked him while reloading, back against the wall. No one had shot back yet. Later, Finch would wonder if the sniper had been shooting at shadows. “You’re old enough.”

He had no answer. No one had ever told him he was old enough before.

Then his father appeared in the doorway, pistol in his hand. The bright green eyes. The neatly trimmed beard and mustache. The broad shoulders. The callused palms.

The sniper turned, began to raise his rifle.

His father shook his head. A grim, single-minded look. Finch had never seen that look on his father’s face before. It wasn’t the expression of an engineer. It came from somewhere more primal.