Core-light, orange and clear, shone down on the city the day before his mother died. It flickered from the passing airtraffic, like silent firelight, as Marroo tiptoed through a quiet apartment toward his mother’s door. In the silence, he did not need his cultivation to hear the footsteps of their upstairs neighbor, or the music coming from an old woman’s familiar several doors away.

He knew this silence. He felt like he’d always known it, like an old friend, or the sibling he would never know. It lived in the house with them, hiding in a corner when his father took him into the training room to spar, or holding his Mother’s hand when she stood over the stove and stared away into nothing. In many ways the silence belonged to her, lived with her, around her, like the aura she would never generate without opening her meridians, or the oldest child she would never replace.

It abated, somewhat, when she sat and read in one of the living room chairs or out on the balcony, or when she busied herself with the chores necessary to keep the apartment in order and Marroo on track with those lessons he wasn’t taught by his father, but it was always there, always waiting until, like an uninvited guest, it came in and took over their lives for an hour, a day, a week, until it finally decided it was time to go.

Marroo could hear it as he approached his mother’s room, sitting in there with her and keeping her company while she dwelled on some line of thought Marroo had never been privy too. He rapped softly on the door, then pushed it open to find her lying curled up on the bed in a square of light reflected into the room by a mirror set out on the terrace beyond her window. He’d often found her like this, in the living room or on the balcony, sometimes even standing over the stove blind to the smoke that rose from the pot in front of her.

Some days she didn’t even respond when he shook her, but not this time. She looked upas he looked in, gave him a wan smile, extended a hand in invitation that he took.

He stepped into her embrace and pushed his head into the crook of her shoulder while she held him and the silence faded into the background.

“What’s the matter?” She asked.

“I’m running away.” He didn’t say. “I’m going to leave.” He was thirteen, almost fourteen. His birth sign was in the sky, distant but visible, swooping turnward through the umber fog of the sky between the core and the curving horizon of the bottom. His father outlined a new training regimen when the shape first appeared, one meant to get him familiar with the sword icon. “Right now there are few you could not kill, touch the icon, and there are few you could not kill in an instant, even in a crowded room.” It didn’t matter to his father that he didn’t want to kill.

Marroo said nothing and his mother’s hand moved along the nape of his neck to stroke his hair. She felt warm, as though the core itself were curled up somewhere deep inside of her radiating it’s heat with her touch.

“You know that I love you, don’t you?” She asked.

He nodded, and felt her free hand tuck up under the book he’d brought curled against his chest. “What have you got here?” She pulled it free then rolled over a little bit on the bed to flip through the pages. She smiled and turned back to Marroo. “Would you like me to read to you for a little while?”

Like the old days.

Like the good days, before the silence, before the “lessons” that killed the child who used to sit in his mother’s lap and listen to stories.

Marroo nodded anyways and sprawled across the foot of his parents bed to listen while she read.

His parent’s bed was a huge thing, at least to Marroo, and at least to him at that time. Their room was a place of perpetual newness, no matter how often he was allowed to enter. Things moved inside between visits, and there were a dozen corners, cabinets, and shelves he’d never been allowed, or courageous enough, to explore. Stacks of books stood on his mother’s side of the room like monoliths amidst the bric-a-brac of her life, looking like the towers beyond her windows in the noon-light.

By comparison his father’s side of the room was neat to the point of being barren. The stand for his familiar’s clip showed the time on his bedside table and a coat hung on a lonely peg above a chair with a spare pair of shoes tucked under it. His father might never have been there if it weren’t for the human shaped dent in the bed opposite his mother’s side.

The silence slipped away as his mother read to him. Her voice filled the room, and if it didn’t quite chase the silence away from it’s corners it at least pushed it back until Marroo could feel his mother was with him once again. He’d intended simply to return the book, to leave it behind when he made his escape from the training regimen his father had in mind, for all that he would miss it. He’d kept it, long after finishing it, in order to mull over sections of the story that seemed to mean more than their words suggested.

They hit one such part as his mother read from the third chapter of the book, a scene where a woman spoke to the daughter she’d killed in an accident years before as thought she were still in the room with her, as though she had the power to influence the lives of those within the Bottom’s shell.

“Can she?” He interrupted as his mother turned a page. He looked up at her, arms crossed over his chest and she paused to look back at him.

“Can she what?”

“She’s dead.” Marroo said. “How could she watch out for her mother?”

“Well…” Marroo’s mother looked at the book while she thought and the silence crept back in around the edges. “Some people say she could.” She said without turning to him.

Marroo rolled over and picked at the stitching in her blankets until she looked at him and the silence fled again.

“Why do you ask?”

Marroo shrugged and looked pointedly away from the fraying red thread between his fingers. When he looked back up at his mother her pale blue-eyes remained focused on him, instead of the silence that occupied them on days like these. He turned back to the thread and plucked hard at it’s end, only managing to tighten it across the blanket’s weave. “Just, wondered.” He muttered.

When he looked back up at her after a minute he found her staring out the window, back at the silence.

“Why do they say it?” He asked before he could think of a better question to draw her out of the silence.

“I don’t know Marroo.” She said, then sighed and pulled her attention back to the present. “The soul, I guess.” She said as she looked at the book. “No one likes to think that their baby is gone.”

“Isn’t the soul just, Breath?” Marroo asked.

“Not when people talk about it like this.” His mother replied. “The soul is the thing beyond magic, or material. It’s what makes you, you instead of anything else The thing that put you together inside of me before you were born.”

Marroo made a face. “That’s biology.” He replied.

“Biology too.” His mother sighed. “Don’t rose adepts do something with spiritual powers to affect biology? I don’t really know kiddo. It’s just part of the story.”

“Part of a lot of stories.” Marroo said, and finally yanked the red thread out of the blanket.

“Don’t pick at the blanket.” His mother told him.

Marroo pushed the thread around on the blanket for a moment without answering, then tucked it down beneath his stomach where it was out of sight.

She lifted the book and looked for their spot.

“What about heaven?” Marroo asked. He stared at the hole he’d pulled the thread out of and tried to think of red as just a color like any other and not the color he kept seeing in his dreams. “Are all the people I… I…” He looked up at his mother. “Do people really live forever?” He finally asked.

His mother was quiet for a long time without looking at him. “Some people say so.” She finally replied, quietly.

He went back to picking at the blanket, a green thread this time.

They only read for a little longer afterwards. When they’d finished the fifth chapter she gave the book back to him and told him to read on his own while she got dinner put together. He rolled over to get off the bed but she pulled him to her before he left.

“Whatever happens.” She whispered. “I want you to know that I love you. I’ll always love you. No matter what.”

And then…

And then…

She died.

Her aircab fell from the sky like so much trash dropped from the clouds to throw her corpse across the street amidst the wreckage of its ruined innards.

Marroo barely saw the adept that came to collect her, or the train that later took her, along with the entire funeral party to the other side of the bottom through screaming darkness.

He wept inconsolably through the entire service that put her to rest, first in the huge Reliquary Temple where she was wrapped in a crystalline coffin, then amidst the vast collection of tombs that covered the bottoms surface beneath the midnight sky of the Beyond.

Stars looked down at them from a sky too vast, far too vast, as the Reliquary led he and his father to the crystal tomb to look down at her one last time before they bid her goodbye.

She looked as though she were only sleeping, waiting for a word to wake up, a touch, some contact that would pull her out of the silence that finally claimed her after so many years of living in her shadow.

Marroo wanted to throw himself at her to do it, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move except to shake and weep. He would have stayed in his seat when the reliquary called the family forward if his father hadn’t lifted him and dragged him stumbling to the coffin.

His father’s face barely twitched as he looked down at his wife. One callused hand touched the crystal over her face.

“Say goodbye.” He grated.

Marroo felt as though his entire body was clenched into a knot. His stomach ached and his limbs shook, and if he opened his mouth there weren’t going to be words that came out. He touched his mother’s reliquary and sobbed instead, until his father took him by the shoulder and pulled him back to their seat where they watched the too tall and pale adept perform the last rites that sealed her away forever inside a coffin that slowly turned blacker than the blackest night.

Afterwards, Marroo stood at the head of a line and shook hands blindly with dozens of men he’d never met. Men with black skin and brown or purple eyes, in black robes that spoke of money, of power, of violence. Their voices seemed to come to Marroo from very far away. Words like “Sorry for your loss. So sorry. A hard thing. So sorry.” Words he accepted mutely as he shook their hands and only registered once they were past and shaking his father’s hand.

“Never heard of a cab going down like that.” One of them told his father. “The trade agents say even accidents don’t happen like that. Sabotage. They aren’t sure how, but I have men looking at it. If it was, then you’ll know.”

“You have my thanks.”

“And don’t worry about the cost. We’re paying for everything out here. If it was the Kotem then it will be a kind of justice, and, well, if not, then it’s a favor for a friend, for all the favors you’ve done for us over the years.”

“You’re too kind.” His Father grated as the man put a dark skinned hand on Darro’s shoulder.

“You’re one of us.” The man said. “We take care of our family.”

The last man to shake their hands smiled as he took Darro’s and looked at Marroo. “Is this the boy then?” He asked. He had a black skinned girl perched on one arm as though she were a jewel, smiling vaguely as the man beside her spoke.

“My son. Marroo.”

“We’ve met.” The old man smiled at Marroo who only vaguely remembered the introduction on the train that brought them all to this side of the bottom. “Will he be following in his father’s footsteps?”

Marroo stared at the smiling man as though he’d spoken another language.

“He’s already opened his meridians.” Marroo’s father grated.

“Has he?” The old man replied. He raised one eyebrow as he turned back to Darro. “So dangerous already.”

Darro nodded. “He’ll touch the icon soon.”

Marroo said nothing as he looked away.

Marroo didn’t see the reception that followed his mother’s funeral. Food decorated tables brought out by the reliquary order, but he couldn’t eat. The guests smiled politely as they spoke with his father but he couldn’t hear them. His father ordered him to… something… but Marroo just stared at him in incomprehension.

Silence roared in his ears and fog blanketed his mind, making it heavy and sluggish when other guests asked him questions that he didn’t try to pretend he understood while the same thought bobbed on the surface of his mind like a corpse he couldn’t quite push under.

His mother was dead.

Then the silence rose to swallow him again until it was broken by laughter from the other end of the hall. The guests kept their laughter subdued, but in the echoing chamber that served as both reception hall and station for the massive train that would take them back to the interior of the world, it echoed loudly over the sussuration of scattered conversation muted by the size of the room they occupied.

The laughter felt like getting stabbed.

He retreated, back into the fog, and the silence, where he tried not to hear the people around him or see the smiles.

He found himself, some time later, standing beneath one of the wall length windows that looked out on the landscape of tombs with a cup of something hot in his hand. From the vantage offered by the temple/train-station he could see miles in every direction, past mausoleums and statuary, oval tombstones and stacked walls of coffins black as beetle’s shells.

The horizon drew his eye, or it’s absence, the absence of any upward curve to the landscape as he was used to on the Bottom, inside the Bottom, instead of out here on it’s shell. Out here the world just… disappeared… dropped away somewhere beyond Marroo’s line of sight… like life, making way for the vast night scape of the beyond and the few dozen pin pricks of light that marred its perfect darkness.

He stared at them for a long time, for something to do, for the novelty of looking at something that did not make him think of his mother or the fact that when he returned home she would no longer be waiting for him in her room, or in the kitchen or in the living room, with a book, or a meal, or a touch to tell him that everything would be okay.

“I often find myself staring at the stars.” A smooth voice said nearby.

Marroo glanced over his shoulder to find the Reliquary “adept” who’d conducted the final rites over his mother’s coffin standing at the foot of the few stairs that led to his window. The man, who couldn’t be an adept if Marroo’s Spiritual senses were true, was tall and pale, as pale as Marroo himself, but alien in his slender features, the flowing gray robe he wore to try and disguise it, and the piercing blue eyes that belonged nowhere in the city of Dregs that Marroo knew.

Those blue eyes didn’t meet Marroo’s as Marroo studied him, but gazed out the window at the brilliant specks of light. The man sipped from a cup of tea like Marroo’s before he flowed gracefully up the steps to join Marroo on the dais beneath the window.

“There is a veil between us and the stars.” The reliquary gestured towards the lights with his cup. “You cannot see it, but it is there. It moves around and hides the stars, but when it leaves, it reveals new stars in its wake. Some old stories say that our world is a hiding place from them, that those are really other worlds whose cores are not contained as ours is, by the bottom, and that monsters lurk within the veil itself but I used to look at them often. I always found them beautiful, despite the stories. Now I rarely find the time.” He stared at the stars for a moment in silence. “They make one wonder what’s out there, beyond the veil. What undiscovered wonders.”

Marroo turned to the dozen stars visible through the window while the reliquary stood beside him and sipped his tea.

“It’s a good view.” The reliquary said. “A fine place to take your rest.” He turned away from the stars to the two silver eyes that reflected them from a boy’s face. “I’m sorry for your loss.” One slender hand touched Marroo’s shoulder. “We’ll keep her safe, out here. Make sure she’s always got a good view.”

Marroo was able to drink a bit of his tea after the reliquary faded back into the gathered strangers from which he’d emerged. He stayed at the window and looked out at the stars while half heard conversations about politics, business, gossip, and goings on whispered behind him.

“Sabotage.” He heard a man scoff quietly from the other side of the room, the same man who’d asked if he would follow in the family business.

“That cab was circling for hours before it picked her up. If there was sabotage, it was done by the old girl herself.”

“That’s what the trade agents say,” Another voice replied, it sounded as though he said it into the bottom of a cup the way it reflected oddly into Marroo’s ears, “But it’s not something you go around saying at her funeral.”

“I’ll say whatever I-”

“Are you a cultivator?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“I’ve seen Darro do things no human being should be able to do. Who knows the extent of their senses, eh? Maybe, let’s enjoy the entrees, shall we? They came a very long ways. It would be a shame to see their journey wasted.”

The cup in Marroo’s hand shook as he lifted his cup to drink and looked up at the stars.