Sighing, Antonin traced shapes in the dust of the floor with a finger and said: “Angelists view him as a god, you know. But as far as we are concerned, he was simply a mighty prophet – and therefore a human. Touched from beyond the world, yes, but not beyond the reach of you or I. Anyone could have been like him, and he could have been anyone. I think… a little piece of him lives in your mind, I think, what the doctors call inherited memories.”

“Why?”

“It’s not an uncommon phenomenon.” Antonin stood up. “You experience it. Your sister experiences it. Your brother may as well, if I am right. I myself had to face my inherited memories, when I was only a little older than you. It was not an easy experience, but I learned much, and the world learned much because of me.”

Sitting on the floor, her breath still shallow after the vivid, otherworldly experience she’d just gone through, Hilda tried to recall other experiences that were not her own. What was it Kamila had said before, about the other person living in her mind? Hilda had no frame of reference for that – voices in her head? Nothing like that had ever happened to her before.

Forgetting someone? Plato Arap laughed, a faint impression.

Shut up, you don’t count.

Antonin stood and walked to the door. Teetering on her shaking feet, Hilda moved to follow. Antonin pulled open the door and gestured Hilda through its threshold. “But I know all of this is a lot to take in,” Antonin said as Hilda followed next to him down the first great corridor of the Reaper Monastery. From tiny windows near the ceiling sunlight streamed in, forming unreadable patterns against the wall. The place had been built, in the old world, so that when light came through the windows it would project holy symbols and local emblems of those who had built the place. That was what the scholars said. The meanings of those symbols, however, was far beyond Hilda’s knowledge.

Antonin continued as they entered a small courtyard (with well-pruned flowers and bushes soaking up the sun as much as they could before evening came), and took a short staircase up to the second floor. The great marbled stone steps felt shorter than Hilda remembered them – she recalled having to reach with great effort to make it to the next step, but now she almost floated up them despite her fatigue. “It’s important,” Antonin said, “that you don’t go so far in pursuit of your goals that you burn yourself out or… well.”

“Or what?” Hilda asked, voice flat, almost sure she knew the answer.

“What do you expect will happen if you become so singleminded in a goal that you expend all the power you have for it? You’d become a monster, you’d allow the world to become nothing to you and so you would become nothing to the world. Less than nothing, even.”

“That isn’t very encouraging,” Hilda said.

“It’s not meant to be encouraging,” Antonin shot back with a smirk that, Hilda thought, seemed a little too satisfied. “It’s meant to be a precaution. It’s important that you understand this, because I’m about to give you your first mission as a member of the Reaper Order.”

Hilda’s heart skipped a beat and thudded heavy in her chest. Already? She had just gotten here, and Etyslund was still in danger. But – was he going to send her back? She wanted to see her father again – she knew he was safe, she’d spoken to him on the radio briefly (a tearful conversation, but full of laughter as well), but to see him again with her eyes, to be near him again… she knew he felt the same.

But Etyslund was a dead place to her, too. She closed her eyes and thought of home, and she saw Zoe Bari and Plato Arap and Cigdem Nacar and Fatih Karga. They were tromping over the corpses of her friends and neighbors and they were laughing. In Hilda’s mind’s eye, the village was forever on fire. Those fires, once set, could never be doused.

“Our Order is spread thin, and it is not so large. Not large enough, perhaps, for the task we set before ourselves. So it is very important that we, as Reapers, look out for one another and for ourselves.”

As they turned the corner, past the old smudged paintings and the shelves of ink and pigment and powder, she tried to steady her breathing, her heartbeat.

“And so your first mission will be…” Antonin said slowly.

“Yes?” Hilda cut in, unable to stand the anticipation for any longer.

Antonin sighed, and Hilda thought she heard the faintest chuckle in his voice. “To heal,” he said. “Because you can’t help the world until you help yourself. Don’t forget why you’re here, Hilda. Others protected you, true, and some day soon, you’ll protect them too. But it was also your resolve that brought you here. You and your brother and sister escaped a burning home to make the journey here on foot – not an easy journey, not without its hardships, and yet you made the journey, you survived it, and you arrived here, still strong.” Hilda tried to smile and nod, but recalled only the truth neither she nor Kamila had told Antonin. She remembered the hot, sharp, crushing pain of Kamila’s metal-wreathed fists slamming into Hilda again and again, the feeling of her own blood rising up her throat.

“You are not helpless,” Antonin said forcefully, perhaps recognizing a bit of her hesitation. “You’re a Reaper.” Antonin stopped there in the hallway and faced Hilda. “So go. Rest. Your apartment should be ready by now. Make yourself at home, and take as much time as you need. We’ll be here for you all the while.”

Hilda smiled, but didn’t say anything as she departed, found the nearest stairwell, and made the climb to the top of the Reaper Monastery.

She found herself at the door of the apartment that Mirshal had provided for her. A nameplate now hung on the door: HILDA ZELENKO. Her hand hovered over the doorknob for a moment before she took hold – cold brass, colder than the autumn air. She turned it and stepped inside.

On entering the apartment Hilda’s eyes were drawn to the window opposite her, to the view of Kivv’s walls and the lake beyond and the mountain beyond that. In the early evening light, the lake was glittering, distant and shining like a sky full of stars. Next to the window sat a plush chair, a familiar-looking black case set upon it. toward the middle of the room, pushed against the left-side wall, was a too-large bed. It looked uncomfortably big for one person – Hilda’s bed in Etyslund was only a third the width of this one. To her left as she entered the room was a bookshelf, nearly empty but for a single volume leaning sideways against the shelf’s wooden wall. There was a small bedside table next to the single flat pillow, and on the table sat a disc player of some sort. Its compartment was open, but there was a disc inside.

Hilda closed the door behind her, ran her hands over the knob, and saw the deadbolt just above it. immediately she closed the deadbolt, breathing a sigh of relief as the metal bolt slid into place and clicked. The door felt more secure, not moving so much with any movement of the knob. Hilda stepped away.

She took her hat from her head and threw it onto the bed, then slowly crossed the room, taking deep breaths as she approached the window. An electric light shone just above the bed, bathing the place in uneven warmth and sending long, reaching shadows through the room like dark flat fingers. She came to stand next to the chair, hand resting on its arm. She removed the case from the chair and set it down in front of her, sitting on the chair.

She opened the clasps of the case, heart beating fast, and when her suspicions were concerned she couldn’t suppress a laugh. The sides of the case fell away and standing inside was a gleaming accordion, red lacquer along its edges framing the keys and the buttons. She blinked, her eyes welled up with tears of joy as she looked down at the instrument. It looked almost exactly the same as the one she’d left behind in Etyslund – almost the same. But it was cleaner, without marks or blemishes, free from the ravages of time. Unlike the accordion sitting abandoned in a basement in Etyslund. Unlike Hilda herself. It was… clean.

Slowly, haltingly, she picked it up. Set it on her lap. Moved her hands into place, her breath coming shallow. And began to play.

The instrument was clearly new and hadn’t been properly broken in, but she began slowly; the reeds crying out as she began. They sang a wistful song, the slow song of a lost world. She depressed the buttons rhythmically, breathing in heavily, and every push against the bellows of the accordion was a herculean effort. She paused a moment, and when she resumed she brought in the keyboard, threading together a simple melody as she tried to remember one of the songs she’d played years ago in the city. She couldn’t remember it – she found herself playing a song from Etyslund instead, but it was out of tune and on each beat she felt she was missing notes.

She pulled the bellows, and for a moment she felt she was pulling closed the door to her basement, sheltering from the chaos, hoping the soldiers didn’t recognize her as she slipped past, another anonymous villager running from her betters. Hilda’s heart beat faster, the notes grew slower and quieter, until she could play no more.

Hilda bent down and set the accordion in its case. She stood up and walked to the other end of the room. She pulled the lone book from its shelf – Haven, Home by Hans Rolvvson. There was more text on the cover, perhaps an acknowledgment or further credit, but it was smudged away, the binding torn, damaged by time. Hilda opened the book and looked inside. The words swam before her eyes, distorted black ink. They were perfectly spaced, perfectly sized, perfectly even. They were all the same. She set the book down and went to the bedside.

From outside, orange light shone into the room. The sun was disappearing behind the walls, behind the lake, behind the distant mountains. Hilda closed the CD player and pressed the play button. Pulses of electronically generated sound washed over her from the small speaker, and she moved around the bed, went to sit on the chair beside the window. The orange outside was mesmerizing.

As she watched the sunset, Hilda noticed a small figure clamber up a ladder to the ramparts of Kivv’s walls. The figure – it was Aleks, Hilda realized – carried a device of some sort, long and bulky, under his arm. He began to pull its legs apart, and Hilda saw that it was a camera on a tripod. Aleks set up the device, his back turned to Hilda. She thought for a moment to open her window and call out to him. But instead, she sighed and sat in the chair and watched the lake’s surface reflect orange light and a thousand points of glittering stardust. The sun slowly disappeared behind those mountains, behind that lake, as distorted lyrics from the old world rang throughout the room. It was a salvaged recording, that much was certain – from before the Aether War. It had that quality to its sound, unnaturally crisp. The singer, caterwauling, spoke of flowers that grew and bloomed in a forgotten place. Through the nighttime streets they stretched and wove until they covered all that was desolate in warmth and beauty.

And then his voice grew loud and strained over instruments Hilda couldn’t hope to name: “Into starlight we call out, ‘we’re still here – can you hear me?’ Up above the moon she’s bathed in burning neon lights – as the starlight just fades out, there’s no tears, no celebration.”

The sun vanished and the land grew dark, and Hilda watched the horizon until her brother finally took his camera and folded its tripod legs together and climbed down from the ramparts. When Aleks had disappeared Hilda watched for a while longer, stood up. She picked up the accordion case, closing it lightly around the instrument and tightening the fasteners. Once it was safely in place on the chair, Hilda walked to the bed and collapsed onto it. She crawled under the sheets, reached over to shut the CD player off.

Hilda fell asleep slowly, staring numbly at the unblinking ceiling. At the back of her mind, the voice of Plato Arap spoke unrepeatable atrocities, and she tried to cut through it, to hear the voice of the Aetheric Angel instead. What was it Antonin had said? She should remember, she should remember the voice that was rightfully a part of her, but it was so thoroughly buried. She reached up a hand toward the ceiling, staring at her red, scratched knuckles. Until finally she fell asleep and was, for a time, at peace.