The Vote

"The floor," Nihil announces, with the enthusiasm of a man chewing glass, "is open."

The refectory has been rearranged into what Joseph insists on calling a plenary session: the long table, the golden map spread over it like a tablecloth of the entire world, and seven chairs — five of us, two twins. Marla attends as catering and, I suspect, as the only adult in the building.

The tower needs a destination. The destination, per Nihil's least favorite word, is a democracy.

"Rules," Joseph says, standing, actually standing, "each party presents. Then debate. Then a vote."

"There are five of you."

"Seven votes."

"We're not voting," Nemo says, mild, from behind his tea.

"Then five votes. Presentations. Clara."

⁂

Clara wants Trax.

She's prepared. She has notes. The republic has the continent's great medical colleges — "actual anatomy theaters, licensing, a healers' guild that isn't a church" — and, she doesn't say but everyone hears, it's the homeland of a certain slate-robed woman whose tower could vouch for five disciples.

"I watched people die that I should have been able to save," she finishes, chin up, daring anyone to make it smaller than it is. "Next time I want to be the one they run TO, not the one who runs for help."

Alex wants anywhere that isn't forests, deserts, or "places with famous monsters," which, when pressed, he narrows to: "Somewhere with a wall. A big, boring wall. And a training yard inside it."

Joseph wants Trax too — for entirely different reasons, delivered as a numbered list. Rule of law. Public archives. "A state that writes down WHY it does things." The republic as an idea seems to physically soothe him, the way the wall soothes Alex.

Helena doesn't present.

"I'm waiting on the last speaker," she says, and looks at me, pleasant, patient, terrible. She's been waiting since a rooftop. She'll wait longer if she has to, and we both know she shouldn't have to.

⁂

Because here's the thing I haven't said out loud, in any room, in either world:

I want to go to Hale.

I've read the cheap edition twice already; the corners were soft when I got it and they're softer now. Fifty philosopher kings. Five hundred sages. A state that worships thinking, wearing my borrowed name, sitting on the far side of the map like a thesis nobody's defended.

It's not homesickness. You can't be homesick for a place that's never seen you. It's worse than that — it's the feeling of a word on the tip of the world's tongue, and the word is Hale, and every time someone says my name a little door opens somewhere I can't see.

But wanting it OUT LOUD means explaining it, and explaining it means lying, and I've been rationing my lies lately. New rule. You don't get to be careful with me — and I'm not careful, exactly. I'm just slow. There's a difference. I'm almost sure there's a difference.

"Oliver," Joseph prompts. "Presentation."

I look at the map. Hale sits enormous in the west, gold letters on all that landmass.

"I'm still reading," I say. "Put me down as undecided."

Helena's face doesn't change, which is how I know it registered.

⁂

The debate is loud and long, and it's the best evening we've had in a month, and I'm mostly out of it, which is its own data point that everyone politely doesn't collect.

Trax leads. Clara and Joseph make an honest bloc. Alex extracts a promise that wherever they go has "at minimum one large boring wall." Marla observes that Trax cuisine is "ambitious," which from Marla could mean anything from a compliment to a war crime.

And the twins say nothing, which I notice, because their nothing has texture. Nemo's eyes keep crossing the map — west, and back. West, and back.

They know something about the west. Or about Hale. Or about me.

Everyone knows something in this story except the people voting in it.

"Then we table it," Joseph rules, when the candles burn low. "Formal vote when we reach the coast. Undecideds" — a glance at me, lawyer-neutral — "to review their materials."

"This was the worst government I have ever seen," Nihil says, standing, "and I have seen four hundred years of them. Bed. All of you."

Four hundred years. He drops numbers like that sometimes, like coins he doesn't count. Somewhere in my head, a filing cabinet catches fire.

⁂

Helena catches me in the corridor, after.

Not an ambush. She just falls in step, hands behind her back, and walks with me through the tower's sleepy golden halls, and lets the silence do the opening statement.

"You know where you want to go," she says, finally. Not a question.

"I know where I want to go."

"And you can't say why."

"Not yet. It's not—" I stop walking. Try again, with the care of a man laying particles one at a time. "It's not a secret ABOUT you. And it's not nothing. It's a thread, and I don't know what's on the end of it, and until I know, saying it out loud feels like—"

"Like naming it," she says. "And names look back."

"...Yeah. Exactly that."

She studies me in the lamplight. The half heart sits at her collar; she doesn't touch it anymore when she thinks, I realize. Somewhere in the last weeks it stopped being a question she was holding and became a fact she wears.

"Okay," she says. "Then here's MY presentation. I vote for the thread."

"You don't know where it goes."

"Neither do you. That's the first honest thing you've offered me since the roof." She starts walking again, shoulder brushing mine, deliberate. "Whenever you're ready to name it, I'll be the second vote. That's what 'obviously' means, by the way. It's on the record."

I watch her go down the golden corridor — past the window where a fat pale moon is keeping everyone's wishes and its own counsel.

Two votes, then.

All right, book. Let's find out what's on the end of you.