“All right,” she said.
What did she mean?
“You can sleep here,” she said. Then she gave both of them a good lie, saying, “Sleep here, but we’re never going to be friends.”
The past was jammed with lost belongings.
Diamond’s father was trapped inside unreachable days. The boy’s old room and simple bed and Mister Mister and all of the loyal lifeless soldiers were trapped there too. He used to be surrounded by trusted faces, and other people had been polite to him and often friendly, and the days were generally pleasant, and life pretended to be as stable and strong as a giant blackwood.
Any other child would be within his rights to cry about all that was gone.
But what Diamond missed as much as anything was an idea—the wrong silly stupid idea—that he was ill.
There were moments when he remembered being the weak child, a fragile little shadow of a boy who was sure to die any time, and he clung to that memory, wishing it could be true again.
But death wanted nothing to do with Diamond.
Even worse, an unbreakable brain lived inside his human-shaped skull, and that brain was powerful by any measure.
Waking in the middle of the night, normal people forgot sometimes where they were and who they were with.
Diamond always knew where he was and that he was alone.
Tonight he was lying at the edge of a giant bed. He was awake for a long while before opening his eyes, and then he looked across the room. Little splashes of light huddled near the door. Otherwise the vast space was filled with inky darkness. Good was sleeping soundly in Mother’s room. When Diamond sat up, nobody noticed.
He sat up and rubbed at what his dream had done to him, and he stared at the dream, which was as ordinary and empty as any that he had ever experienced. He was standing inside the Archon’s quarters with the faraway ceilings and the magnificent furnishings. List, the Archon, was standing beside King, the two of them discussing the war’s progress. Nobody else was present. Every phrase had been yanked from overheard conversations. Battles that would win the war were about to happen. Except of course those battles had come and gone and nothing had changed. Every military ship named in these plans had been destroyed long ago. List and his son were firing giant bombs that didn’t exist anymore. They were going to scorch papio cities that were already left as ashes. Key trees and installations had to be defended, except all of them had fallen into the sun hundreds of days ago. And most remarkably, father and son spoke as if they were generals, as if they had any genuine role in the endless waging of war.
Everybody in that dream was trapped in the past, and nobody knew it.
Diamond quit rubbing himself. A fancy metronome stood on the table beside the bed. Touch the button and it glowed inside. Even if this was a short night, the night was young. Why was he awake? Putting his bare feet against the fur-covered floor, Diamond shut his eyes again, listening intently. Eventually one sharp blast found him, followed by a bigger explosion that came rolling in from the same direction, passing through the room before hurrying across the darkened world.
The war wanted to be noticed.
The war was an angry baby that screamed loudest when it was ignored.
Diamond dressed in yesterday’s clothes. His room’s main door opened with a touch, and he stepped into the hallway. A sentry was at the end of the hallway, guarding List’s door. There was just enough light that the sentry could watch a boy cross to the toilet. No rules were being broken. Nothing needed to be said. Other guards were nearby, but the rooms and passageways were designed to keep most of their protectors out of sight. What passed for home was a self-contained space buried inside the Archon’s ancient palace. Only three routes led inside and out again, and each of those doors was kept locked. Home was a hard-shelled seed tucked in the middle of a giant fruit. The palace was the fruit wrapped inside a fortune in corona scales, but this interior house sported its own layers of scales and skin as well as cunningly hidden sacks filled with water—a stopgap means to frustrate the fire bombs that still hadn’t managed to come this far.
List’s quarters were in the center. Diamond’s people lived on this side of List’s quarters, and King lived on the other side, near the Archon’s offices. Windows were forbidden, which was for the sake of security and very reasonable. But it was an absence that never stopped reminding Diamond of his first room, closed off and secret, and that made it easier to remember how small and fragile his body had felt in those times.
Diamond used the toilet and flushed the bowl, and he let the sentry watch him return to his room, which was his plan.
The door floated on greased hinges, and by turning the knob, he made the hard sounds that a sentry expected to hear when the bolt was resting in the jamb.
The nightlights were luminescent yogurts. He stared at them and waited for the sentry to begin his routine rounds.
Another distant rumble arrived, following the same pathway.
Diamond was no little boy anymore. He wasn’t grown either, but the enduring body was showing interest in maturing. What had always looked small was gaining meat and strength. He would never be half as powerful as King, but when they trained together—and they trained every day, without fail—it was apparent that Diamond was going to wield more power than most fit men.
The curly thick hair was very long just three days ago, but then it was sheared off and sent to a factory making armaments for the war. Like everything else about Diamond, his hair only looked human. But it was as strong as the best kinds of silk, and if woven together in the right way, a mass of his hair could become the armor that an important soldier wore over his heart.
The world was that desperate. One boy’s hair could win the war.
The sentry wasn’t moving.
Diamond waited.
Humans, true humans, grew sick when they were sad. Beasts called grief and depression engulfed the soul with blackness, and the blackness could kill even the strongest among them. Mother was depressed for a long time after Father died. Diamond had worried about her. Everybody was concerned about her state-of-mind. But then Good couldn’t sleep with him anymore, and somehow the monkey ended up inside her room. After that, she wasn’t so sick with misery. Not that Good made her happy, because he didn’t. But his face looked at Mother when she spoke, relating thoughts that she kept from others, and the monkey was older and better trained now, which helped the two of them live together. Mother was so comfortable with her friend that she had begun planning how she would have to change her life to care for an orange-headed monkey as he moved into old age with its endless, unremarkable problems.
Sadness and blackness and every shape of worry had found Diamond, and each clung to the deepest reaches of his mind.
Yet his mind was unbreakable, stubbornly free of numbness, or worse, the hopeless serenity that came to some people when they suffered an absolute collapse.
Diamond could not stop remembering who began this war. In his head, a button was waiting to be pushed or be left alone, and the boy pushed it willfully, without hesitation. There was no forgetting the moment or the very good reasons that shoved him into that moment. He could summon every doubt and every smart regret suffered over the last five hundred and ninety-one days. But doubt and regret didn’t wipe away one event. The Ruler of the Storm launched its worst weapons, and the war eventually killed the airship and half of its crew, and most of the survivors had perished in a string of less historic, relentlessly tragic battles.
Diamond had memorized the crews’ names, and because those tallies were published on occasion, he studied the pages for those names. That was an important, awful chore. And despite the misery, Diamond was prepared every day to read another long line of dead names.
The palace was ruled by security. No part of the world was genuinely safe, but these rooms were secure enough that hundreds of known faces could work close to the unbreakable boy, and every day brought strangers through the guarded doors. There were events to be attended—symbolic meals and symbolic meetings and audiences with dignitaries eager to see both of the corona’s children. Standing beside Diamond, some visitors made it their duty to assure the odd boy that nobody blamed his finger for the war. That was a lie, of course. But sentries and servants, ambassadors, and various generals felt it was important to remind him that the Eight did horrible things to the world. It was the Eight who killed his poor father, and revenge was something that everybody understood. There was also blame for the papio and certain awful people among the human ranks, and there were plenty of hatred that was already ancient and would survive this business just fine. “As inevitable as the days,” they said about war—a phrase too old to have any author. And then the optimists would claim that if Diamond hadn’t punched that button—if his courage had failed him—then the next war would have certainly found them on even less decent terms.