While a cabal of the city’s most powerful plotted to get their hands on Thadwick Mercer and the other four, Thadwick’s sister was on her family’s boat with Jason. Jason and Cassandra were – if the half-dozen Mercer family staff were discounted – all alone on the open water. The vessel was the size of some billionaire’s yacht, to the point that Jason suspected the sails it boasted to be vestigial. It was made of wood but was a far cry from the wooden ships Jason knew. White paint and smooth lacquer, seemingly impervious to the seawater and salty air, gave it a feel more akin to a contemporary pleasure craft.

There was a sunken lounging area in the middle of the foredeck. It was a square space, lined with seating on all sides and sporting a glass table in the middle. A huge parasol was affixed to the centre of the table to offer shade.

“This was a very good idea,” Jason said. “I’m so glad you offered. Everything has been sadness, frustration and grief lately.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Cassandra said. “First the lost people to the expedition, now these outsiders with their inquiry are pushing to hand Thadwick over to them.”

“For what?” Jason asked.

“They think something was done to him and want him examined by their own people when ours have already looked him over quite thoroughly. Mother is considering having Thadwick leave until everything has blown over. You haven’t heard anything about it from the gold-ranker, have you?”

“Emir’s involved in it? I haven’t seen him for days. If nothing else, I’ve been caught up trying to get my new indenture to listen to me.”

“Things not going well with your first indenture?” Cassandra asked.

“I’m here to forget about that,” Jason said, “not talk about it.”

“I thought you were here for me?” she said provocatively.

“Nope,” Jason said with weary shamelessness. “You are a very welcome addendum to what is primarily an escape plan. I just hope you don’t take on the usual role of beautiful women in escape plans and betray me at a critical moment.”

“What kind of critical moment would I betray you in?” Cassandra asked.

“Well,” Jason said, “the kind that has a hammock, for preference. I’m sure saw I spied a hammock hanging up somewhere when I came aboard.”

“Was it big enough for two?” Cassandra asked.

“You know, now that you bring it up, I actually think it was.”

She let out a relaxed chuckle.

“Even if it wasn’t,” she said, “it will be by the time we wander over there.”

The staff were discretely out of sight, but Jason could sense their auras.

“That must have been a very strange way to grow up,” he said. “Never having a truly private moment.”

“It teaches you to put on a façade,” she said. “One that takes an unusual person to shake.”

“Shaking it isn’t the trick,” Jason said. “You need to make the person want to come out from behind it. You have to be tantalising.”

“That’s what you are, is it?”

“I think I have my moments,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me.”

“Where is it exactly that you learned your particular way of handling people?” she asked.

“Private school.”

“Private school?”

“Yes. I grew up on a rather pleasant little stretch of coastline. Just a little town, tourists in the summer.”

“Tourists?”

“Taking a holiday where I come from is a lot cheaper and easier than it is here. It isn’t just the wealthy who can do it, although they certainly do it best. The less affluent participating in such activities are called tourists.”

“Do they have something to do with your private school?”

“Definitely not. Around thirty years or so back, a lot of wealthy people looked at our lovely stretch of coast and the conveniently placed local highway and decided to move in. Being rich folk, of course, they had no interest in our humble little town. Small, exclusive communities started popping up around us like mushrooms after the rain. Swanky summer homes and the kind of accommodation you can only afford if you own a boat like this one.”

“It doesn’t really rain here,” she said. “I’ll have to take your word on the mushrooms.”

“I’m trustworthy,” Jason said. “I just don’t seem like it because seeming trustworthy is suspicious.”

“You can be an unnecessarily convoluted man.”

“Thank you. Anyway, a lot of these rich people would only hang about for the summer, but enough stayed that they needed a place for their children to go to school. Thus, the Casselton Educational Institute was formed. Excellent teachers, quality education. Exorbitant cost. Everyone of means in the region sent their children there, from the first day of school until they were sent off to university.”

“Education is more prominent in your homeland, isn’t it?” Cassandra asked.

“For now. The government keeps taking away money from the public schools to give to the wealthy private ones, but they haven’t finished the job quite yet.”

Cassandra didn’t need to ask why; power dynamics were universal across worlds.

“Now, we weren’t amongst the richest of the rich,” Jason continued, “but my family did very well for themselves. My mother got in property sales early, making quite the bundle on the influx of wealthy buyers. My father is a landscape architect and had a strong hand in literally shaping the new communities. Between them, they sold and/or designed most of the region.”

“So your family had money enough to send you to this fancy school.”

“I don’t look like most of the children who went to that school. My father’s parents came from another land and we only have humans where I come from. Instead of looking down on elves or leonids or whoever, people isolate and exclude by ethnicity.”

“That sounds foolish.”

“It is. It's getting better, but there are always these undercurrents of prejudice, coming out in little ways most people don't even notice. It's like constantly being pricked with needles and being accused of making a fuss if you have the gall to point it out.”

“That doesn't sound delightful,” she said.

“You get used to it. That's just the background issue, though. The more specific problem was my older brother.”

“He made it hard for you?”

“Not intentionally, which made it all the more difficult to deal with. You see, my brother is excellent with people. He’s the handsome one, the charming one. The obedient one. He can just go with the flow, let things pass without questioning. He has a way of intuiting what people want and becoming that. A social chameleon. Do you have chameleons here?”

“We do,” Cassandra said.

“Well, he is one, socially speaking. He doesn’t manipulate people, not consciously. He just likes people and people like him. He went down very well with the wealthy families, who liked how unprejudiced they looked if their children had a multiethnic friend. It saved them from getting one themselves.”

“Let me guess,” Cassandra said. “One outsider friend was just the right amount, with a second one being surplus to requirements.”

“Exactly,' Jason said. “It sounds like rich families are the same wherever you go.”

“The way you describe your brother reminds me of Beth Cavendish,” Cassandra said. “You’ve met her, yes?”

“I have,” Jason said.

“There aren’t a lot of non-human families at the peak of Greenstone society, which doesn't always look good when you're are dealing with global training partners. Beth is something of an ideal, which makes people want to rope her in. She's very socially adroit, in a more subtle fashion than you. Similar to your brother, I suspect.”

“Are you saying I don’t smoothly fit in?”

“Your approach to socialising is like tossing snakes into a ballroom.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said innocently.

“My mother said that the first time you met her, you denied being in a group with some of the city’s most powerful people and claimed to have won a raffle.”

“I forgot about that, he said with a chuckle. “You're right about being socially adroit, though. I never had Kaito’s – that’s my brother’s name, Kaito. I never had his skill for getting along. I just can’t seem to help challenging and provoking.”

“Yes, we’ve all noticed.”

“Shush, you,” he said, putting a finger to her lips. She kissed it and pushed it away.

“I was one foreign boy too many,” he continued, “despite not being foreign at all. Kaito is a year older than me, so as far as the other kids were concerned, I was a disappointing rehash of the well-received original. I only had one real friend. The literal girl next door. Her name is Amy and we grew up together.”

“Who you fell in love with, obviously,” Cassandra said.

“Oh, it wasn’t just love,” Jason said. “It was eighties power-ballad love.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she said.

“Imagine a man with long hair, no shirt, open vest and leather pants, walking into the ocean while singing a song.”

“That sounds like an insane person.”

“Yes,” Jason agreed. “It was that kind of love.”

“It came to a tragic end?”

“She married my brother.”

“That must have hurt.”

“I reacted poorly, I’ll admit,” Jason said, “but that’s a story for another day. When we were in school, my brother cast a long shadow and I never had his knack for becoming what people wanted. It turned out that my knack was for getting people to do what I wanted. At least for a little while, until they realised what I did and got cross. They had no interest in being my friends, though, and I quickly stopped caring what a bunch of entitled rich kids through about me.”

“It’s been my experience,” Cassandra said, “that things can become quite political when you gather enough wealthy children together.”

“That’s been my experience as well,” Jason said. “There and here. Speaking of entitled rich kids, how is your brother doing? You said people were looking to study him.”

Cassandra nodded, unhappily.

“Things had been going so well with him after the expedition. He’s been training non-stop, actually building the skills he should have developed long ago. Mother and father are thrilled. Or they would be if it weren't for the rumours going around, which is why people want to take him away and start probing him.”

“What kind of rumours?” Jason asked. “I’ve been too busy to keep an ear out, lately.”

“Your friend Bahadir brought tracking stones for all the members of the expedition, first to rescue survivors, then recover the fallen. There were five people, my brother included, whose tracking stones lost track of them. They were still found, all severely hurt. Now people are saying that something was done to them in the time they couldn’t be tracked and they were left to be found.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “Thadwick is finally turning into the person we always hoped he would become and people found an all-new way to harass him. They say the changes to his personality are some kind of magical parasite.”

“I know from experience that being thrust into wild and unexpected danger can see you come out the other side different. I’m not the man I was before coming here. I’ve seen dangers and been driven to become as prepared as I can be for the next time. It makes sense to me that Thadwick experience something similar.”

“Thank you,” she said, leaning into him. “I know you and he never got along and I thought that might taint your judgement.”

“Hopefully, I’m growing as a person. Have the other four been experiencing similar problems?”

“They have,” she said. “To the point that they felt the need to all leave their old teams and form a new one together.”

“That will only deepen the rumours.”

“I know, but Thadwick seems more settled this way. Go back to talking about your school; I want to hear more.”

“Well, there’s not much to tell, really. I learned two lessons about people that have always held true, in my world or yours. One was that people really like to fill in the gaps in a story. You give someone the right selection of facts and you don’t have to lie to them. They’ll connect the pieces in accordance with their own beliefs and lie to themselves for you.”

“Wouldn’t that make people wary of you, once they figure out what you’re doing?”

“That’s where the second lesson comes in,” Jason said. “When someone believes something, they believe it hard. Too hard. They’ll dismiss good evidence that contradicts their belief and accept spurious evidence that supports it. So, in their mind, if you’re wrong, they’re very wrong, and the whole point is that their thoughts don’t go down that path.”

“That sounds like something that could get out of hand,” Cassandra said.

“Oh, yes,” Jason said. “These realisations were far from original revelations. People have been using them in my world for thousands of years, to rather disastrous effect.”

“So, why use them?”

“Amy used to ask me the same thing. People liked her better than me.”

“What did you tell her?”

“It’s what I have,” he said. “Like any tool, it’s about how you use it. A hammer can build a house or club someone to death.”

“Did it make you any more friends?”

“I would more say it gave me an accepted position in the social landscape. I’ve learned to take a quality over quantity approach to personal relationships,” he said. “Look at you, for example. Every eligible young man in the city hates my guts because of you, and so they should. You are spectacular by any metric.”

“Thank you. But what about this Amy girl? It doesn’t sound like she was too spectacular.”

“She was,” Jason said. “Still is, presumably. I’ve known her for most of my life and there’s no one I understand better. She was absolutely worth falling in love with, which only became a problem when my brother finally noticed that fact.”

“If you knew her so well, why didn’t you see it coming?”

“I told you: people will dismiss good evidence if the bad evidence tells them what they want to hear. I’m no more immune to that than anyone.”

“You seem to have taken it well.”

“I can talk about it, now,” he said. “At the time, I blew up my whole life, forming an ever-deepening vortex of mediocrity. Banal job, no real friends. A series of relationships you could see the end of before they began.”

He flashed her a wry smile.

“Coming to an alternate world was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “Of course, nine of the ten worst things that ever happened to me happened here. Still, completely worth. I’m happy with the balance.”

“Well,” Cassandra said. “Maybe we can go find that hammock and tilt the scale.”