The albinos, too, were far more visible than they had ever been in Inrhio. In-country, the whitefolk routinely held menial positions—gardener, nursemaid, chauffeur—although the very high-caste indigo preferred to hire low-caste blueskins for those positions if they could. Nolan’s mother had often said a good albino housekeeper was worth any salary she wished to charge, and she would trust an albino man with any job around the house. But she had warned her children against trying to make friends with the whitefolk. They were trustworthy, but they were still foreign.

But in the city it was a different story. The albinos kept mostly to themselves in small enclaves in the northern and western edges of the city. Here, however, they were not just domestic helpers but acute businessmen, running affluent shops that catered to the whims of guldmen and blueskins alike. They led tidy, quiet lives and mingled freely with the other two races, causing no dissension.

Unlike the gulden, who—it seemed to Nolan—caused dissension everywhere. Sudden violence seemed to swirl around the gulden like a windswept aureole of danger. One man would kill another, suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the street in the middle of the day. And, Nolan couldn’t count how many news stories he had heard of gulden children slaughtered in the women’s ghetto on the west edge of town. It was always some gulden male on a rampage, come to the city specifically for the purpose of hunting down this particular woman and her hapless clutch of children.

Ariana Bayless had decided long ago that gulden crimes against gulden residents should be judged and punished by peers. So the city officials did little to curtail these acts of violence. Gulden men and gulden ways; that was no business of indigo lawmakers.

None of it made any sense to Nolan. But he did not have to understand the gulden. He merely had to coexist with them, as civilly as possible, until his abbreviated life in the city was done. And then he would return in-country, marry Leesa, and live the life he had been destined for. And that, he was very sure, was a life that would hold no surprises.

CHAPTER TWO

Kit stood at the balcony of the eleventh-story window and watched night unfold over the city. Even she had to admit that it was very picturesque, and she was not fond of the city. But the city, which was serious and workaday during daylight hours, took on a playful mood as night fell. The double row of white lights that outlined the Centrifuge made a great endless loop around the buildings; the multicolored lamps of the entertainment district fluttered like tossed glitter. The moving headlights of trolleys and trucks wove among the stationary beacons, and the undying flame on top of the Complex scrawled its brilliant, varied comments against the deepening black of the sky.