“No. I honestly don’t know why not. At first I thought it was because I was afraid: I know that once I give them what they want, and they don’t need anything from me any longer, they will come for me. I understand that. But it isn’t that. Not at all. I don’t feel afraid. I feel … angry. They killed a girl I knew. That I was seeing. That I had stupidly told about what I was working on. And I can’t get her out of my head. It’s not a reason. It’s just a thing that bothers me too much to let me move on. I don’t know what I want—but I know I don’t want to give them this.”

“To turn a temple into an assassination device.”

“Yes. To corrupt it.”

“Like you have been corrupted,” he wrote.

Rustem felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Later he would remember this moment—when this man’s words penetrated to the core of him. Later he would say to someone, “I didn’t know, until that second, that all of us have a portal. I didn’t even know, then, that he had found mine. But I felt it. It was like he reached into me, and turned a dial, and the entire mechanism that made me who I was shifted into a new configuration.”

“Yes,” Rustem said.

“And what will you do?”

Should you ever need us, come ring the bell. And when the time comes, do what is right.

“That is what I want to know. What to do. They tried to kill you, didn’t they?”

“They did,” he wrote. “They believe I care about what they are doing. I do not. What I care about is only this place. The republic. They can do what they like—just not here. They killed fifteen other people trying to get to me.”

“The autofreighter accident.”

“Yes.”

“Easy enough to do if you are good. I’ve broken into them before.”

“Three of the people they killed were children. One was a baby, nine months old. Sleeping in its crib.”

“I keep thinking of the dogs,” Rustem said. “On the island. Why did you tell me about them?”

“To give you something to consider. A problem to work out.”

“I keep thinking of those people, rowing to the island to leave food.”

“The kind ones. The ones who cared enough.”