But the king did not sleep well. He dreamed of the tower burning down around him. Every wall was ablaze and there was no way out.

5

IONA WOKE UP TOO early and couldn’t get back to sleep. She got up and ate breakfast, as always, with the shutters closed. But even when she finished breakfast she didn’t open them. Today she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

She had made a decision never to tell anyone about her tangential part in the arson incident. That was straightforward enough but she was thinking over the ramifications. Even if her secret was never discovered, merely having it separated her from everyone else and it always would. She felt like she had wandered a little farther from home than usual, only for the ground to crack behind her and a tectonic shift to pull her away.

Tectonic was another dream-word. She grasped its meaning but it related to nothing in the real world. These words seeped into her internal monologue quite often, never to be used in conversation. When she spoke aloud she found other words.

Nobody knows how strange I really am, thought Iona.

She finished eating, walked the short distance to work, and went directly to the chancellor’s office. She told the chancellor that Weston’s death had hit her harder than expected and she’d like to take a few more days off. Her request was accepted. Her requests were always accepted.

Upon leaving the school grounds she walked down to the site of the fire, telling herself there was nothing suspicious in this—lots of people were going there and unlike them she could pass it off as professional interest. Of course she couldn’t get very close: the investigation was still ongoing and a high fence had been hastily erected around the ashes and charred fragments. There were several gaps in the fence and citizens gathered around them to peer morbidly in. Iona stood at the back of one such crowd and waited for those in front of her to drift away.

When she got her turn at the front there was little to see. The blackened frame of the unfinished building was being dismantled before it fell down and the job was almost complete. A deconstruction team carefully lowered beams and struts to the ground and gathered them in a stack, ready for the furnaces to extract any remaining energy they had to offer. Other workmen filled cart after cart with ash and towed it away to the landfill.

At the foot of the fence people had laid flowers even though the official story was that nobody had been inside the building when it went up. What they mourned was the building, like it was a newborn child that had never gotten out of the hospital. (Dream-words again.)

Iona looked up from the flowers. A few meters away on the other side of the fence, watching her, stood Saori.

Iona met her gaze and nodded, as she would to a colleague in the corridor at the school. After a moment Saori nodded back.