DYEAWAN AND SLEEP HAVE BECOME distant relations over the past several weeks. She still loves her small room, and Dyeawan could never bring herself to resent the first soft bed she’s ever called her own. She simply cannot find that place where one’s eyes separate from their mind and truly rest. Instead she lies awake, staring at the darkness beyond her window and listening to the island sounds of midnight surf and nocturnal birds. Dyeawan recalls sleeping inside empty barrels and behind garbage bins in alleys for so many years. She marvels at how well she slept then, day or night, despite the cold and the constant fear and the harshness of her surroundings.

Eventually she declares defeat for the evening, pulling herself from the bed and onto the litter of her rebuilt tender. Dyeawan decides to row through the keep until her body tires enough to overcome her mind.

The corridors of the Planning Cadre become a tomb in the dead of night. There are no armed guards stalking about, and there’s no enforced curfew keeping the many residents in their quarters. In fact, Dyeawan knows people on every level of the Cadre who work through the night often, finding they do their best work then. However, everyone seems confined to his or her little corner of the keep at this time. It’s rare to find anyone traipsing through the corridors.

Dyeawan finds herself paddling toward Edger’s quarters before she is truly aware of the action being undertaken by her arms. She’s begun to feel she may have treated Edger too harshly. If Dyeawan is going to be a planner and coexist with the others she must learn to set aside her suspicions and distrust.

A seam of warm amber light slices across the corridor. Its source is the door to Edger’s private rooms, opened just the scantest inch. Dyeawan can hear voices rising inside, the timbre of the words growing fast and heated. She rolls as quietly as possible up to the door’s edge, careful not to place herself in the path of that light where her shadow will be noticeably cast. Dyeawan leans forward from the litter of her tender and creeps a single eye past the edge of the door’s frame.

Edger is reclining in a salon chair. His vacant eyes stare at the ceiling as Quan deftly stripes Edger’s cheek with a razor, expertly shaving his face.

“I understand it is a requisite of your trade to overreact to virtually everything,” Edger says to someone unseen. “However, in this particular instance I do wish you would tamp the weed, as it were.”

“I am hardly overreacting.”