Rhen’s leg bounced against the train seat. Arannet’s did something similar next to him, but her fine shoe did a click-click-click on the metal floor with every bounce. Aki sat across from him, his colors a muted blue. That didn’t give Rhen a lot of confidence, but then again, he hadn’t specifically cataloged all of Aki’s colors.

The script he and Jakira had worked on played over and over in his head. He was dying. He wanted to give a young boy hope. He wanted to save a life.

Rhen was worried that painting the Delver School in a negative light wouldn’t sit well with the deliberators. They were a separate guild, but they did work with every other guild in some capacity. Rhen didn’t know how much corruption ran through the civil services sector. He didn’t know how much the Desedras had paid for a guilty conviction. There was so much he didn’t know. But one thing did give him comfort.

Jakira was back at the inn, preparing to depart. Rhen had upgraded the res-node to be able to expedite resurrections. He saved another profile and set his to the most expedient resurrection timer possible. He wondered if there were any risks associated with that. Growing a whole new body in just two hours… it seemed like something that could go wrong. Then again, he knew next to nothing about the in-between realm where the bodies were gestated.

After tearful goodbyes and too many strong hugs from both Joseph and Derk, Rhen, Aki and Arannet boarded the train to his sentencing. Would Tansi really show? Could she save him? He didn’t know.

The train ride was both agonizingly long, and far too quick. They arrived with a horn-hoot that made Arannet jump.

“We’re here already,” she said with a nervous chuckle.

Rhen keep his movements deliberately slow, rising to his feet like an old man. He thought maybe if he kept his body calm, his mind would play along too. They walked from the platform to the busy city streets. The inhabitants were none the wiser about where Rhen was headed to, nor did they care. The whole of the realms would go on without him just the same. There was a depressing comfort in that thought, but was it true?

Rhen had seen so many dungeon owners abuse their power for wealth, and he’d vowed never to be like them. He brought something to dungeon ownership that he’d only experienced once, a long time ago, when he was a terrified child trying to start a new life as an imposter. Kindness.

He didn’t want to just be kind to his delvers, but his dungeon, too. There was a delicate balance of anima flow to keep each wonderful and unique ecosystem stable. And there was the Tree of Being, which he hardly understood, that needed more owners like him striving to connect the realms and grow the tree.

They walked up the steps to the cold stone building and Rhen cut off the daydreaming. They took their ticket and waited in line until they were called up to the check-in desk. After showing the attendant the summons, Rhen was met by two guards in black armor, exactly like the ones who’d led Welsh away to his sentencing.

“You’ll be held in a private chamber before the trial,” said the attendant with a scornful glare. “It’s standard procedure for murderers.”

Heat filled Rhen’s face, but there was no point arguing with this fluffer. He’d follow the rules, he’d go along with everything they wanted and play nice, so he’d have better chances in the deliberation room. Rhen shook Arannet’s hand and Aki gave him a slimy hug.

Instead of heading up an elevator, they took a winding staircase down to a lower level. The basement was utilitarian and detached. There were no nice benches, no shimmering granite floors, no bits of art hanging on the walls. It was all bright lights, plain concrete, and blue-glowing anima barriers.

They walked through a narrow hall to a gatehouse where two guards sat with their backs to the window, watching a wide, segregated orbeye display that showed off several different rooms, some inhabited, some empty.

“Open twenty-three,” the guard on Rhen’s left said.

The black-garbed guard in the gatehouse turned to a panel on her left and put in a few commands. There was a buzz-snap and the barrier before them opened just as Wyland’s design had worked for the res-node. Rhen wondered idly if the old genius had designed this system too.

His room was empty and cold, save for a toilet to relieve himself in the corner. Rhen sat cross-legged on the floor and closed his eyes, running through the script. After an hour, he got up to stretch and pace around. He replayed the script again, hearing the deliberators and everything they might say, everything Tansi might say. How would he respond?

Again, and again he built scripts on scripts, preparing for what could happen, until finally a guard appeared beyond the staticy blue anima barrier. They motioned down the hall to the gate guard and the barrier went down.

Rhen walked politely with the guards up to his deliberation room. He was alone—save for the guards—in a smaller room he assumed was at the bottom of the dais. He wouldn’t get to walk into the deliberation room with the rest of them. They wanted to call him out as unworthy of being among the populous.

He exhaled long and slow through his nose and took another deep breath. They opened the door and the first thing to hit Rhen was the noise. A thousand voices of idle chatter filled the tiny room. Rhen stepped out into the lowered dais to a staggeringly full auditorium. People were crammed in every nook, some even stood far up the stairs to the back where the doors to the outside sat.

Rhen swallowed hard and searched the crowd for his friends as the guards guided him to his seat, smack in the middle. He sat with his back to the others, not having found them, and the guards chained him down. It was strange to think he’d been walking among polite society for a decade without chains, the truth of his life still the same as it was now.

The deliberators filed out onto their platform and the auditorium quieted. They took their seats, and the procession began.

“Maddox, what was your relationship to Rhen Zephitz?” The head deliberator, Mr. Smithen, asked. The use of his school given name set his heart pounding even faster than it was.

He took a breath, and began his script. Rhen explained how he came to be at the delver school, Rhen senior’s medical condition, and their delving adventures. When it came time for the emotional gut punch line, Rhen faltered, but powered through with a stammer that he hoped the audience took for pain rather than fear.

“He was like my father. I loved him.”

“And yet you took his life?” the deliberator from the delver’s guild asked.

Rhen took another breath and began the second script, the tale of his forced identity shift.

“You could have returned to the school and been reimprinted with your true identity, but you did not. Why?”

Rhen’s gaze shot to Mr. Gorreck, the deliberator that represented the delver school. “I was being held hostage—

“I object to this,” Gorreck cut in, standing from his seat. “He was cared for, clothed, homed, and fed.”

“And promised that I could never leave! My debt compounded month after month and no matter how hard I would work, I couldn’t pay it off. I was a slave, as many orphaned children in the delver schools are.”

Well, that wasn’t part of the script.

The room burst with chatter and Mr. Smithen sounded the overhead horn. The lights above flashed several times as the horn blared and the room fell back into order.

“The abandoned children are a burden on society, one the delver schools carries to prevent suffering,” Gorreck said with a haughty tone.

Rhen fumed but kept his temper in check. “But there is no plan to release them to the realms as able-bodied adults to live their own lives. When a child gets too old, you sell their debt to prison dungeons. That was to be my fate in a matter of months if I hadn’t accepted Rhen’s offer to take his identity. I wasn’t a criminal. I was a child who wanted his own life.”

“Let us move on from inconsequential subjective details and return to the facts,” Gorreck said. “You robbed the delver school of the funds it needed to continue to care for the other children. You stole from their mouths.”

A Sephine deliberator representing civil affairs, Ms. Kiril, raised her hand and a spotlight shown down on her, giving her the floor. “Let us not forget the wife who was wronged, her husband taken. Let her speak on this matter.”

Rhen swallowed hard, sweat gathering in his palms.

The room murmured and Rhen heard fine shoes clopping down the steps toward the lowered dais. Tansi, in an elegant blue dress with frills at the neck and shoulders, took the raised seat in front of Rhen. She looked down at him, her face still and unreadable.

The room slowly came to order.

“Rhen was a man full of love. Everything was beautiful, every life sacred, all struggles just an opportunity. I failed him in his struggle.”

The crowd bubbled with chatter, but Tansi went on. “I failed to see how delving was beautiful to him, and I feared my social status would be diminished if I joined him. I failed to see how this little orphan, whose own parents hadn’t seen fit to love him, could be worth loving, worth risking my position for. I see now how worthy he is. You grew up just like him. I’m sorry I couldn’t—I couldn’t be more…” Her voice broke.

The noise in the room grew but Rhen didn’t care what anyone was saying. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He knew her family was a well-enough off dungeon owner but didn’t understand what any of that had to do with delving a dungeon or saving a delver school orphan from their bondage. Perhaps upper society was more complex and confusing than he knew. All the more reason to stay out of it.

“More sentimental non-facts,” Gorreck said.

Tansi sniffled and looked to something on the desk before her. “Please call up evidence file RZ001.”

Smithen motioned for Gorreck to sit with an insistent glare. What a fluffer…

The lights around the auditorium dimmed and the overhead spotlight cast into the center of the dais between Rhen and Tansi. The anima took shape in the face of man Rhen knew well. His sponsor. It must’ve been the same day he took Rhen delving to end his life. His black hair was thinned at the top and sides, with streaks of white. His cheeks were hollow, and his steel-gray eyes sunken.

Rhen swallowed the lump in his chest as the image smiled, and began to speak.

“Tansi, my love, I’m so sorry. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep dying for you. I wish I could face you, but I know you would stop me if I did. I’m going to give the boy my life. He’s so wonderful, just as you are. He’s brilliant, funny, strong, and kind. I wish you could love him like I do. If I could ask one thing of you… don’t turn him away. Help him. He will need someone to protect him until he can stand on his own.”

The image stuttered and Rhen took a sharp breath. He didn’t want it to be over, not yet.

“If I dally any longer, I might back out. Cutting out one’s own syntial and core takes strength I might not possess at the end. I hope I can.”

The image of Rhen stuttered again and he sighed deeply. He was exhausted. “I don’t have the money to pay Maddox’s debt to the delver school. I beg you to reconsider and help him. If he’s to get out from under them and live free as me, he will need that debt paid. Consider this my last request of you, or your father.

“Now, for the legal part. I, Rhen Zephitz, do hereby consent to the transfer of my identity to Maddox, knowing full that the result is my permanent death. I do this willingly. And if this ever sees the light of day…” he paused, brow furrowed. “I’m sorry it came to this, my boy. I’m sorry for what you’re about to go through. I love you.”

The image faded out and in the quiet darkness, Rhen could hear Tansi sob. The lights came up and he found her, face buried in her hands. His throat was hot and tight. He wanted to say something to her—but what? He had no script for this.

Gorreck slapped his hand on the fine wooden desk before him. “This does not matter. His debt was not paid, and willing consent or no, Maddox took a life!”

Smithen clocked his gavel. “Recess for two hours. We will reconvene with our final judgement then.”

Tansi climbed down off the platform and made for the exit.

“Wait, please,” Rhen called out to her, and she stopped, her face turned away from him.

He could hear the crowd behind him growing restless, standing and moving around. All he could see was her, and the tall walls the confined him.

“Will you look at me?” he pleaded with her.

She took a few steps back and turned to face him. Her eyes were red, and cheeks streaked with tears.

Just like Tsu’me, and the Faust family, Tansi’s decisions were made from a place of fear and pain, not malice or greed. He couldn’t forget what she put him through, but it had led him here. Would he have found Jakira and Aki if he hadn’t lived the life he had? Would he have bought his little plot and found a nexus node that led to the eighteenth realm?

“I don’t know if you want it, but you have my forgiveness, and my thanks. I know that was hard for you, and I know you’ve gone through other trials I don’t understand, and hopefully never will. So, thanks you for being here. Thank you for trying to save me.”

“So like him,” she whispered, grimacing to hold back tears. She stepped forward and placed her hand on his shoulder. “I hope you can go home to your family. They’re everything. Cherish them.”

The black armored guards appeared from the side doors and pulled Rhen away to his holding cell. Rhen lay on the ground and closed his eyes, willing himself to sleep to pass the time. He didn’t want to think, but all he could see behind his closed lids was his sponsor’s sickly face.

Rhen must’ve slept, because just moment later he was roused by a kick to the foot. “Time to go,” the offending guard said.

Rhen stood clumsily, his chained hands and feet making it difficult to move. He moved back into the deliberation room where the crowd seemed to have grown. Rhen finally caught sight of Arannet and Aki, who’d chosen to sit low in the auditorium near him. Rhen hackles raised as he caught sight of another familiar face.

Sen Desedra.

He was leering like a lion ready to pounce on its prey. Rhen wondered if the fluffer had paid the delver school deliberator to be such a stubborn prick, or if all the school employees were just wretched.

They strapped Rhen back into his chair and after a few minutes, the deliberators appeared. The crowd quieted when they took their seats, and a spotlight shone down on Rhen, and the lead deliberator.

“In the case of Maddox, we find him guilty in the second degree of manslaughter, and in the first degree of debt evasion. Punishment, a two-hundred-thousand-mark sentence in Everest II.”

The crowd exploded with sound, but it was drowned out by Rhen’s thudding heart.

Guilty…

There was only one thing left to do.