“I heard your name first in Myrshock,” said Kar’uchai. “It was on a list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again until . . . all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you . . . were linked. People whispered . . . of your researches. Flying monsters and thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought. What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice, Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you . . . not to do that.

“It was finished. He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think . . . we did not know that he might . . . find a way . . . that justice could be retracted.

“I am here to ask you not to help him fly.”

“Yagharek is my friend,” said Isaac steadily. “He came to me and employed me. He was generous. When things . . . went wrong . . . got complicated and dangerous . . . well, he was brave and he helped me—us. He’s been part of . . . of something extraordinary. And I owe him . . . a life.” He glanced at Lin and then away again. “I owe him . . . for the times . . . He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he stayed and without him . . . I don’t think I could have come through.”

Isaac spoke quietly. His words were sincere and affecting.

What did he do?

“What did he do?” said Isaac, defeated.

“He is guilty,” said Kar’uchai quietly, “of choice-theft in the second degree, with utter disrespect.”

“What does that mean?” shouted Isaac. “What did he do? What’s fucking choice-theft anyway? This means nothing to me.”

“It is the only crime we have, Grimneb’lin,” replied Kar’uchai in a harsh monotone. “To take the choice of another . . . to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to . . . for all we individuals to have . . . our choices.”

Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions . . . Talking and talking of individuals . . . but crushing them in layers and hierarchies . . . until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.

“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone . . . And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night . . . they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.

“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.