“It’s about not seeing,” Chuan explained to her just after he brought the meal to the table. “The perfect magician is all-blind, all-unknowing. No sound reaches a wall to wake an echo; no touch bridges distance.” He leaned back against the wall where, Horanga imagined, the cloth of his shirt hung over the hollow curve of his back. He lived in a house in the city, by the river, and long ago the sound of fish swimming endlessly in that river would have distracted her from her purpose.

In space there are no seasons, and this is true too of the silver wheels that are humanity’s homes beyond Earth and the silver ships that carried us there. In autumn there are no fallen leaves and in spring, no living flowers; no winter winds, no summer snow. There are no days except our own calendars and the stars’ slow candles in the dark.

The Network has known only one war, and that war ended before it began.

This is why, of course, the Network’s ships trapped in q-space–that otherwhere of superpositions and spindrift possibilities–wield waveform interrupters, and why, though I was Rachel’s friend, I killed her across several timelines. But the tale begins with our final exam, not my murders.

How many shapes of pain are there? Are any topologically related? And is one of them death?

Biantha woke to a heavy knocking on the door and found her face pressed against a book’s musty pages. She sat up and brushed her pale hair out of her face, trying to discern a pattern to the knocking and finding that the simplest one was impatience. Then she got to her feet and opened the door, since her warding spell had given her no warning of an unfriendly presence outside. Besides, it would be a little longer before the demons reached Evergard.

Kendra knew with every pulse of her blood what the people of Liadhe remembered best about Sharadon Brent: his steady eyes and pale hair and shining medals, hero of battles past…the scandal when he left Liadhe after a war to become a mercenary, wandering among foreign stars.Warmonger, they called him now, the man who loved bloodshed so deeply he abandoned his home in peacetime.

It was different for her. She remembered instead his strong hands drawing chord after chord, descant after shimmering descant, from his lute. An anachronism, that lute, requiring human hands to sing. Years ago Kendra had listened drowsily while Sharadon Brent tuned the seven strings, adjusted the frets, serenaded the night. His voice haunted her, too: as quiet in song as in speech, yet she had ached for it later, after they called him to the war against Veretys….

They tested me again and again to ensure that the implant had properly salvaged the functions of damaged tissues. “An experimental procedure,” a doctor said once, actually volunteering information. I had learned to hoard my questions. In return, they accepted it when I chose not to say if I felt any pain here, or here, or here, if I remembered. Perhaps they thought I no longer understood pain, or my past. They were right on one count.

Red Knight, they called me, like a chess piece. I tried to tell them that there was no red knight in chess, that it could never be played. They never answered.

You didn’t want to be here, not really, not ever, but want is a one-way word these days. The government says jump, you ask what delta-vee. So here you are, wherever here is in the continuum of worlds, every reflex tuned to snapping. Fresh out of training, you have yet to trade scars with one of the aliens’ battleships; no one’s yet engaged one face-to-face and lived to brag about it, if they have faces.