THE LAMPS OUTSIDE had barely dimmed third hour when Melni left for her office on Newberry Terrace, near the city center. A stiff wind off the ocean had sent temperatures plummeting overnight. She hugged herself as she walked, her treadmellow shoes all but silent on the cobbled backstreets.

She expected an empty building, save perhaps a few of the zone correspondents who kept careful vigil throughout the night for anything interesting coming in from points far to the east or west. What she found instead was a bustling den of activity. The sight of it made her breath catch in her throat.

“Ahey. What is it?” she asked the first person to pass by her, a reporter whose name she couldn’t recall. “What has happened?”

The tall, thin woman cocked an eyebrow. “Four rassies, dead. Murdered.”

Rassie. The North Rassle Department, or NRD. Elite state police. To accost them would earn a lifetime in prison. To kill? Four? She could scarcely imagine the punishment. No one in their right mind would dare take on the NRD. Except…Melni shivered. Another asset from the South, perhaps? Some botched mission? “Wh-Where?” she managed.

“Way up past Hillstav. Beaten to death with a spade, apparently.” The woman stepped in close, dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Word is the killer dragged the bodies to a clearing and performed some kind of sick ritual. Stripped them. Covered them with dirt, if you can believe that. Keep that last bit to yourself, Mel. No one else has it. We have a friend in the rassies talking. Might even run a mid-week about it. ‘A madman in the hills.’ The people will eat it up.”

Melni glanced around at the buzz of activity in the wide, airy room. A dozen reporters were already in, probably all anxious to get the assignment. They’d be checking timetables for express rollers north and wondering who they could pass their existing stories to. Speed was of the essence now, lest she be dragged into this mess. She stood and walked purposefully to the wire room. The operator on duty rolled his eyes when she entered, then offered a strained smile. “A bit busy, Mel.”

“It is not about the Hillstav thing.”

His eyebrow cocked up. “Oh?”

“Yes. A local matter. Can you get me Boran over at the station?”

The operator grumbled a bit, then started plugging wires. “Everything is clogged. Give me a few, all right?”

She waited just outside the door. A couple of minutes later she plunked herself down in booth three and grabbed the handset. “Detective Boran?”

“Just a moment,” the operator at the police station said. The line popped and hissed a few times in her ear.

“Ahey,” a gruff voice said.

“Boran, it is Melni. From the Weekly?”

“Thought you would call. Look, about that Hillstav business. You are the third to—”

“This is not about that,” she said.

He grunted. “What then?”

“The accident at the Valix lab,” she started, “any new developments?”

“No.”

She let out a long breath. “Nothing at all?”

“Well,” he hesitated. “Look, do not report this. We had to sign something called a nondisclosure agreement. Some new legal birdshit Alia insisted on. Means we—”

“I can guess what it means. You have my silence, promise.”

A few seconds passed as he evidently tried to decide how much trust he could put in her. She felt suddenly proud of the ethics she’d employed while working this cover. Just the right blend of probing questions and dogged patriotism.

He said, “They were testing a chemical mixture, a new coolant for some kind of engine. It all goes straight through my ears, of course, like most of what that desoa woman says…no offense meant, of course. The test led to an unexpected reaction, an explosion. She actually demonstrated it for us with a tiny sample. Gave quite a whump.”

Her handlers would want to know about this. “Quite a whump” meant possible use as a weapon. “Interesting. But listen, about the memorial—”

“Yeah,” Boran said, “held at her estate tomorrow. By Garta’s light do not tell anyone I gave my invitation to you.”

He said he’d leave the paper at the front desk under her name, and clicked off. Melni sat in the booth for several minutes, trying to decide if this was a stroke of luck or a horrible risk. Both, she concluded.

She stopped only to grab her backpurse, waving off several editors who claimed they needed to see her right away. “On to something big,” she muttered to one with a wink. That was all it took. Half an hour later, just before the midday hour of five, she stepped into the station headquarters in Upwest and gave her name. The receptionist handed her an envelope without a second glance.

Melni took a pedicab to the fashion district. Most of the boutique windows were filled with the typical drab style of Combra—grays and browns like sky and soil. For a memorial, color would be required, the more the better, and she decided to spend extravagantly. She went to Blade’s, one of the best tailors and a rising star in the trade after Alia Valix had selected them to produce garments based on her own designs.

Twenty minutes later and two months’ salary lighter, Melni emerged. She spent the afternoon and evening alone in her flat, preparing. The spare bedroom she’d long ago converted for photoprint development. A dark blanket covered the only window. Tables lined the walls, covered with square metal basins under shelves of various chemicals. Boxes of supplies were tucked underneath the tables, paper, lenses, and filter masks spilling out in unkempt fashion.

She knelt by the far table and pulled a box out from under it, revealing a small furnace vent behind. She removed the slotted grating and reached inside. The ventilation channel within bent ninety degrees, and she had to shove her arm all the way inside before her fingers brushed the end of a length of twine. Melni coaxed it out, and the parcel to which it was attached. She could have done this with her eyes closed, not that the dim red studio lamp was much better.

The canvas bundle weighed only a few pounds. She rolled it open on the floor of the room and considered the contents. Her hand went reflexively to the pistol. It was cool and satisfactorily weighty in her hand. Not the sort of thing to carry into the Valix house. The weapon went back into its cloth wrapping. She selected instead a good knife and a set of lockright’s tools, packing them into loops of elastic fabric she’d sewn into the thigh straps of a pair of rather indecent stockings, high up and on the inner portion where the typical frisk was unlikely to probe.

Melni finished her ruse of film work and left the room. She had dinner in, and was midway through the meal when the door chime rang. A representative from Blade’s stood in the hall, carrying a rectangular beige box.

“Your purchase, with gratitude,” the woman said, handing it across the threshold. “Signature, please.”

Melni signed, then expressed her own gratitude with a fourcoin from a jar beside the entrance.

An hour later she sat on her bed, sipping bad Cirdian wine and studying photographs she’d clipped of the Valix grounds from various sources. The memorial gathering would likely take place on the east lawn of the vast estate. Around the property’s perimeter ran a high stone wall, broken only by three gates. All three, Melni knew from numerous scouting trips, were staffed full-time: ten hours a day, ten days a week. The guards were well trained, many recruited out of the NRD, lured by high salaries and the tantalizing prospect of working close to the paragon herself.

The space between the lawn and the building proper was split between a vast hedge maze and an artificial lake. “What that must have cost,” Melni whispered.

Her eyes were drawn to the house itself. The vast building had required almost a year to construct, and at least for a brief time had been utterly unique in architectural style. It was elegant and somehow even understated despite the enormous size. The walls were in a daring white, capped by overlapping red tiles that hid the usual mess of vents, pipes, and chimneys on the roof. Some of the walls were even curved, and there were windows everywhere. Any one of its marvelously fresh features might have failed on its own, but taken as a whole few could say that it didn’t work. Quite the opposite. It was a masterpiece. The question few Northerners asked anymore, the question that drove every action Melni took in her covert occupation, was how a refugee orphan from the wastes could manifest such brilliance across so many fields. Engineering, physics, and mathematics all at least made a kind of sense. The disciplines went hand in hand. They could be learned. But Alia Valix excelled at anything she set her mind to: politics, fashion, law, commerce, architecture.

How? How did her mind work? Her company was decades ahead of any competitor, yet rather than trying to crush such foes, Alia showed a stunningly deft hand at business acumen as well. She licensed, she contracted, she forged unlikely partnerships across seemingly unrelated industries. As a result the North benefited at a pace matched only by the woman’s net worth.

And it had all happened so blixxing fast. That’s what Melni could not wrap her mind around, and what had the South so concerned. The Quiet War, started shortly after the Desolation had so neatly divided Gartien into North and South, had in all that time never veered far from a state of equilibrium. Valix had changed all that, and with terrifying speed. The North’s rate of technological advancement grew exponentially each year now. At Riverswidth the analysts, if you could get them to talk candidly about such things, said another year or two of such unchecked progress would lead to weapons and countermeasures that would render the North unstoppable should they decide to escalate. Even pessimistic estimates had the North winning a military victory inside of ten years, should it come to that. The way things were going, Melni wondered if another scenario entirely might play out. Citizens of the Southern states might begin to eye the progress enjoyed by their Northern peers with a little too much envy. They might start to wonder why they shouldn’t switch allegiances, geography be damned, and who could blame them?

The flat’s thin walls creaked as a frigid ocean wind came in off the harbor and moaned through the streets outside, driving rain to clatter against the windows. Melni drained her wine. She shifted her attention to a schematic of the mansion proper, stolen from an electrician’s office during the construction process. She reviewed the security systems and excessive plumbing for the hundredth time.

The drawing had vexed her from the moment she’d first cast her gaze upon it, for what it lacked rather than what it showed. In the center of the home, below the main rooms, was a gaping blank area marked simply “Think Tank.”

For a long while Melni just stared at the empty section of paper, as if the act would produce the detail she so desperately wanted. Tomorrow she’d be on the grounds. Closer than ever before to the famed room where Alia pondered the problems of the North and how to profit from fixing them.

Even now this mysterious place seemed as far away as shining Garta herself.