They stepped off the bus and into a world without color.
It took them several minutes to notice. The absence was so complete that the mind initially refused to register it, filling in the expected hues from memory rather than observation. The sky should have been pale blue. The buildings should have been grey concrete and rust-streaked metal. The signs should have buzzed with the garish neon of a hundred competing storefronts. Instead, everything was black and white and the thousand shades between, a monochrome spectrum that rendered the world into something resembling a photograph of itself.
Imogen noticed first. She looked down at her dress, the pale blue fabric she had chosen specifically because it caught the light in a way she found pleasing, and saw only grey. A shade indistinguishable from the grey of the road, the grey of the walls, the grey of everything else in her field of vision.
She made a small, indignant sound.
"My dress," she said. "It looks so bad here!"
Kamina glanced at her. His own red cloak had become a deep charcoal, his blue hair a pale silver-grey. "Looks fine to me."
"Fine is not the point. The point is that I bought this dress because it was a specific color, and now it is not that color. It is just grey. Like the road. Like the walls. Like your face."
"My face is not grey."
"Your face is completely grey. You look like a statue."
Kamina rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Maybe you should wear something that stands out more. Something with texture. Like a…"
"Don't say dress."
"I was going to say drag."
"That's worse."
"I don't know, drag might work better in monochrome. Really lean into it. You could be the first fixer to make drag a fashion statement."
Imogen punched him in the arm. It was not a playful tap. It was a full, committed strike delivered with the precision of someone who had been trained to handle a rifle and understood the mechanics of force transfer. It made a sound like a small piece of meat hitting a counter.
Kamina grinning a big smile.
She hit him again. Then a third time, with increasing futility. By the fourth, she had given up and was simply glaring at her own fist as though it had personally betrayed her.
Shmuel had been watching the exchange. He reached into his coat and produced two timepieces.
"Wear these," he said, handing one to Kamina and one to Imogen. "They're your access to the district. Without them, the Time Collections Agency will flag you as unregistered and start asking questions. Questions that involve fines. In time. Which is money here."
Kamina took the timepiece and turned it over in his hands. It was a simple design, a leather band with a small clock face set into the center. The numbers around the dial were standard T Corp. Standard Time markers.
"I already have mine on," Shmuel continued, showing his own wrist. "I bought us roughly two weeks of staying time. That's fourteen days at twenty-four hours each. I connected all three timepieces to the office's bank account, so if we need to stay longer, it'll automatically draw funds and extend us another two weeks."
"That's convenient," Imogen said, strapping her timepiece to her wrist. The grey of the band matched the grey of her dress. She looked at it with the resigned acceptance of someone who had decided to stop being annoyed and start being practical. "What's the catch?"
"It's expensive," Shmuel said. "Very. Maintaining a twenty-four-hour day here costs more than most people in the Backstreets earn in a month. We can afford it for now, but I'd prefer not to push past the initial two weeks unless absolutely necessary."
Kamina strapped his own timepiece on and held his wrist up to his face, squinting at the clock face. "So time is money. Literally."
"Literally."
"And if you run out of time?"
"You don't run out of time. You run out of the time you've purchased. The minimum for survival is four hours per day. If you drop below that, your body slows down. You move slower, think slower, exist slower. The rest of the world passes you by." Shmuel's voice was matter-of-fact, the tone he used when conveying information that was grim but non-negotiable. "People who can only afford the minimum live in a permanent state of lag. Four hours of consciousness spread across a twenty-four-hour cycle. The other twenty hours, they're effectively frozen."
"That's horrifying," Imogen said.
"That's how the Wings do things."
They began walking. The Backstreets of District 20 stretched ahead of them. The people on the sidewalks moved at varying speeds. Some walked at a normal pace, their timepieces glinting on their wrists. Others moved in slow motion, their steps drawn out across seconds that should have been fractions, their faces slack with the particular emptiness of those who were only partially present in their own lives.
"Everyone's watching their clocks," Imogen observed quietly. She was looking at a woman who had stopped at a corner to check her timepiece, her brow furrowed.
"Everyone's always watching their clocks here," Shmuel said. "Time is the only currency that matters. You spend it to live, you earn it to survive, you hoard it to feel safe. It's the same anxiety as money in any other district, just more visible."
They passed a bakery. The smell of fresh bread drifted out through the open door, warm and incongruous against the monochrome backdrop. Imogen slowed for a moment, her nose lifting, then caught herself and kept walking.
"We should eat something," she said. "Before we meet the children."
"We have time," Kamina said. "We bought it!"
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"Hey I got my Bro here I think my joke is funny which means it's objectively fun."
They found the bakery stall at the front of a row of shops, its awning striped in what might have been red and white in another district but here presented as charcoal and pale grey. The display case held rows of bread, rolls and loaves and pastries, all rendered in the monochrome spectrum that made everything look like a photograph of food rather than food itself. The smell, at least, was unchanged. Warm yeast and baked flour and the faint sweetness of something that might have been honey.
The woman behind the counter wore a high-collared dress with puffed sleeves, the fabric gathered at her waist in the Victorian style that characterized the district's aesthetic. Gears turned slowly in a display mounted above the cash register, part decoration and part functional machinery, their brass teeth catching the grey light. A small steam vent on the side of the counter released a periodic hiss of white vapor.
Shmuel ordered for all three of them. Two loaves of plain bread, a half-dozen rolls, and something sweet that the woman recommended for travelers. The transaction was conducted in time, the cost deducted from his timepiece with a soft chime. He tucked the bag under his arm, the mechanical limb adjusting its grip to avoid crushing the contents.
Kamina and Imogen took their shares immediately. They walked side by side, eating with the synchronized efficiency of people who had learned to consume meals in transit, their steps matched without conscious effort. Imogen held her roll in both hands, taking small, precise bites. Kamina tore into his with the enthusiasm of a man who had not eaten in several hours and considered this a personal injustice.
"This is good," Imogen said, her voice muffled by bread.
"Food is good after a fight," Kamina replied, chewing.
"That's not true. The noodles we had in District 12 were terrible."
Shmuel followed a few paces behind, the bag of remaining bread held carefully in his mechanical hand. He had not eaten his share yet. He was waiting until they were stationary, or at least until the likelihood of sudden violence had diminished to acceptable levels. The backstreets of District 20 were cleaner than District 12, but clean did not mean safe.
The hooligans appeared from behind him.
Shmuel sensed the movement before he heard it, the shift in air pressure that accompanied a body moving with hostile intent. He stepped sideways, the motion fluid and unhurried, and the knife that had been aimed at his kidney passed through the space where he had been standing.
The hooligan stumbled forward, off-balance. Shmuel did not even raise his hands.
"You could have just asked for directions," he said.
More of them emerged from the alleys on either side. Ten in total, their clothing a mix of worn waistcoats and patched trousers, the aesthetic of the district rendered shabby by poverty. Goggles hung around necks. Pocket watches glinted on chains. Knives and blunt instruments were held to intimidating people who could not fight back.
Within seconds, they had surrounded the three fixers.
Kamina finished his bread in a single, enormous bite. He chewed once, twice, and swallowed. Then he looked at the man who appeared to be the leader, a stocky figure with a scar across his chin and a knife pointed directly at Kamina's chest.
"If you want an ass beaten right now," Kamina said, "I will give you."
The leader did not lower his knife. His eyes moved to the timepieces on their wrists, calculating their value with the practiced assessment of someone who made his living through theft. "Hand over the timepieces. All of them. And the bag. Then maybe we let you walk away."
Kamina's katana, still in its sheath, swung upward. The motion was almost lazy. The sheath caught the leader under the chin with a sound like a stone dropping into still water.
The leader's eyes rolled back. His knife clattered to the street. He crumpled.
Imogen took another bite of her bread.
Kamina moved into the remaining nine, completing the work. The second hooligan swung a pipe at his head. Kamina ducked under it, brought the sheathed katana up into the man's stomach, and then swept his legs out from under him. Two down. The third and fourth came at him together, one from the left and one from the right. Kamina stepped between them, caught the left one's wrist and twisted until the knife dropped, then elbowed the right one in the temple. They hit the ground almost simultaneously.
He turned to the remaining five. They had stopped advancing. The power differential had become apparent, through the rapid and casual dismantling of their colleagues.
"We can leave," one of them offered.
"Too late."
Kamina knocked them all out. It took perhaps thirty seconds total. When he was finished, ten hooligans lay scattered across the street, groaning or unconscious or some combination of both. None of them were dead. None of them would be getting up anytime soon.
Imogen finished her bread and dusted her hands together. Shmuel, who had watched the entire encounter without setting down the bag of bread, resumed walking.
"The Nest should be about an hour from here," he said. "If we keep pace."
Kamina fell in beside Imogen, his katana back at his hip. "Do we have any more of those rolls?"
"Nope, I finished it all."
""YOU BRAT!""
The orphanage sat at the edge of the Nest's boundary, a three-story building of dark brick and wrought iron that rose against the sepia-toned sky. Steam vents lined the upper floors, releasing intermittent plumes of white vapor. A clock tower rose from the center of the structure, its face marked with A Corp. Standard Time numerals.
Above the main entrance, a sign. Brass letters on a dark wood backing, each character polished to a soft gleam.
The front door opened into a wide common room. Windows lined the upper walls, letting in the grey light of the Nest's perpetual sepia afternoon. The floor was dark wood, scuffed at the edges but clean, and the walls were hung with framed diagrams of celestial bodies. Constellations. Planetary orbits. The phases of a moon that might or might not still exist above the City's shrouded sky.
And there were children.
They occupied every corner of the room. Some sat at low tables with books or papers spread before them. Some clustered around a mechanical orrery in the corner, its brass arms rotating slowly to demonstrate the motion of planets around a central sun. Some simply sat and watched the door.
Most of them had undergone prosthetic conversion.
Some had only partial conversions, a single arm or a pair of legs replaced. Others were more extensive. A girl near the window had both arms and both legs replaced, her prosthetics painted with tiny stars in what must have been a custom job. A boy on the stairs had a mechanical eye that whirred audibly as it focused on the newcomers.
The youngest children, the ones who had not undergone conversion, were clustered near the back of the room. Their flesh-and-blood limbs looked fragile beside the metal of their siblings.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward the door.
Every pair of eyes gazed upon the Great Kamina Office.
Then the children swarmed.
They did not approach with the wariness of street children, the careful distance of those who had learned that strangers meant danger. They approached with the open, unabashed curiosity of children who had been raised in a place where strangers were rare and therefore interesting. They surrounded Kamina, Imogen, and Shmuel in a tide of metal limbs and bright eyes and overlapping questions.
"Are you Fixers?"
"What grade are you?"
"Did you bring anything?"
"Is that a real katana?"
"Can I touch the katana?"
"What happened to your arm?"
"What's that bag? Is there food in the bag?"
Imogen, who had never been swarmed by children in her life, stood frozen. Kamina, by contrast, was grinning broadly and already answering three questions at once.
"The katana is real. No, you can't touch it. Yes, we're Fixers. Grade 7 office."
Shmuel held the bag of bread above his head, protecting it from the grasping hands of the smaller children.
"Where is the director's office?" he asked a boy with a mechanical arm who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to reach the bag. "We need to check in."
The boy pointed toward a hallway at the far end of the common room. "Second door on the left. Mr. Eisenhower's in there."
They made their way down the hallway, the children parting reluctantly around them. The second door on the left bore a small nameplate, brass on dark wood, the letters engraved with the same care as the sign outside.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Director
The door opened.
The office beyond was not large. Bookshelves lined both walls, crammed with volumes on astronomy and engineering and the particular intersection of the two disciplines. A window at the far end looked out onto a small courtyard where more children were playing, their prosthetic limbs catching the grey light. And in the center of the room, behind a desk that was nearly invisible beneath mountains of paperwork, a man was working.
He was older than Shmuel had expected, his hair gone completely white, his face lined with the particular wear of someone who had spent decades doing work that never ended. He wore a vest over a high-collared shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his fingers were stained with ink. The paperwork on his desk was arranged in stacks that seemed to have their own internal logic, a geography of administration that only he could navigate.
He did not look up when the door opened.
"The maintenance report on the third-floor heating unit is overdue," he said, his voice carrying the distracted authority of someone who was still half in the paperwork. "If you're from the T Corp. Facilities Division, I need another week. The children keep adjusting the thermostats and I haven't been able to…"
He looked up.
He saw the three Fixers standing in his doorway, the children crowding behind them in the hall, and the bag of bread that Shmuel was still holding above his head like a trophy.
"Ah," he said. "You're not from Facilities."
Kamina stepped forward. "We're the hired Fixers. For the commission. The stargazing project."
Eisenhower's expression shifted. The distraction cleared. He set down his pen and rose from his chair, extending a hand across the mountain of paperwork.
"Yes. Yes, of course. Alexy's people. I received the confirmation the day you accepted this commission. You're ahead of schedule by several days." He shook Kamina's hand with a grip that was firmer than his age suggested. "I'm Dwight Eisenhower. Director of Asan's House of the Star."
He clapped his hands twice.
From the corner of the room, a machine stirred. It was block-shaped, roughly the size of a small end table, its surface a patchwork of brass plating and exposed gears. It moved on four stubby legs, the joints hissing with steam, and navigated the cluttered floor with the careful precision of something that had been designed for exactly this purpose. A tray extended from its upper surface, bearing four cups of tea.
The machine set the cups on the only clear corner of Eisenhower's desk. Then it retreated to its corner and went still.
"Please," Eisenhower said, gesturing to the tea. "Sit. There are chairs somewhere under the paperwork. Just move the stacks."
Imogen found a chair, removed a pile of astronomical charts from its seat, and sat down with the posture trained from birth to occupy chairs in formal settings. She lifted her cup of tea with both hands, her back straight and took a small sip. The cup was plain, the tea was unremarkable, but she drank it as though it were being served in the finest drawing room of Brithelm.
Kamina, who had not found a chair and did not appear to be looking for one, remained standing.
Eisenhower returned to his seat behind the desk. He looked at the three of them, his eyes moving from Kamina to Imogen to Shmuel, and something in his expression softened.
"You're here for supervision," he said. It was not a question. "For my most special of children. The ones who look at the sky."
Shmuel set the bag of bread on a relatively stable stack of papers. Then he reached into his coat and produced his tablet, the screen flickering to life as he pulled up the contract.
"That's correct," he said. "We received the commission from Alexy fews days ago. The terms specify supervision, support, and protection for a group of four children engaged in a stargazing project. The duration is unspecified, but the rate accounts for significant operational flexibility." He turned the tablet so Eisenhower could see the screen. "This is the contract as we received it. We'd like to confirm the details before we meet the children."
Eisenhower leaned forward, his eyes scanning the document. The steam machine in the corner released a soft hiss. Outside the window, the children in the courtyard laughed at something none of the adults could see.
"Yes," Eisenhower said. "The ones who look at the sky." He looked up at Shmuel. "I'll tell you everything you need to know."
Eisenhower leaned back in his chair. The steam machine in the corner released another soft his.
"The four children you'll be supervising," he began, folding his hands on the desk before him, "are the brightest minds this orphanage has ever produced. And I do not say that lightly. Asan's House of the Star has been my life's work. I have seen hundreds of children pass through these halls. These four are different."
He reached into one of the stacks of paper and withdrew a file, its cover marked with the Asan company's logo, a stylized star above a gear.
"They created something," Eisenhower continued. "An invention. A telescope." His eyes moving to the window and the courtyard beyond. "That is what they called it, at least. I suspect the word is inadequate for what they actually built."
Shmuel's tablet was still in his hands, the contract still displayed on the screen. He had not looked away from Eisenhower since the old man began speaking. "What does the telescope do?"
"It gazes into the sky." The words suggested he had spent considerable time thinking about how to explain this. "According to the children, it is designed to see the truest shape of the world around them. To observe not merely the positions of celestial bodies, but the nature of those bodies. The reality beneath the appearance." He spread his hands. "Their words, not mine. But I have spent enough time with these children to know that they do not use words carelessly."
Imogen set down her teacup. The porcelain made a soft click against the saucer. "According to what you are saying, it was registered under the Asan company's name."
"Yes." Eisenhower nodded. "All inventions developed within T Corp.'s jurisdiction must be registered through the Technology Administration Agency. The Patents Agency regulates their use thereafter. It is not a simple process, and it is not a forgiving one. If the telescope had been registered under the children's names, they would have been subject to oversight that would have made their work impossible. The Asan company provided cover. The invention is legally ours. In practice, it belongs to them."
"That's generous," Shmuel said.
"It is kind from us." Eisenhower's voice carried the barest edge of something harder. "The Asan company exists to support the work of this orphanage. That is its sole purpose. I did not found a company to make money. I founded it to give these children resources they would otherwise be denied." He paused. "But that is not the part of this story that concerns you."
He withdrew another document from the file. This one was thinner, a single page with a header that Shmuel recognized as an internal incident report.
"A representative from the Asan company came here to test the telescope," Eisenhower said. "This was three weeks ago. The children had completed their initial calibration and wanted an independent observer to confirm their results. The representative was a volunteer. One of our engineers. A man who had worked with optical instruments for fifteen years."
"What happened?" Kamina asked.
Eisenhower looked at him. "He looked into the scope. And his mind shattered."
The word hung in the air of the small office. Outside, the children in the courtyard laughed again, a sound that now seemed to come from a great distance.
"The representative survived. He is receiving care at a facility in the Nest. But he no longer speaks. He no longer recognizes faces. He stares at the ceiling and sometimes he cries and sometimes he laughs and he cannot explain why. The physicians say his neural pathways have been fundamentally restructured. As though something he saw simply overloaded the circuits of his cognition and they rewired themselves in response. Into what shape, they cannot determine."
Imogen's hand had gone still on her teacup. Shmuel's mechanical fingers had tightened around the edge of his tablet.
"The children were horrified," Eisenhower said. "Not by the telescope. By what it had done. They had not intended to cause harm. They had simply wanted to see the stars." He paused. "They are curious and wonderful children. Their first instinct, after the shock passed, was not to abandon the project. It was to make it safer."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"They told me they will try again. With more measures to ensure the safety of the observer. They want multiple people to look at the same time. They believe that sharing the observation will distribute the cognitive load. That the truth they are trying to see will be less dangerous if it is witnessed by more than one pair of eyes."
Kamina was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "That's either genius or the worst idea I've ever heard."
"It is both," Eisenhower said. "Which is the nature of most things worth doing." He closed the file and set it aside. "But curiosity always has its price. And the price of this particular curiosity has already been paid, at least in part, by a man who will never be the same. The children know this. They carry it. They are determined to try again anyway."
He looked at Kamina, and his expression was the expression of a man who had spent his life watching children reach for things that were too large for their hands.
"Your job is to make sure that when they reach," he said, "someone is there to catch them if they fall from the sky."
The City had no patience for curiosity. It never had. Curiosity was a luxury that the world punished. The questioner was silenced. The explorer was lost. The dreamer was ground down into every forgotten corner. The stars were not meant to be seen. They were not meant to be understood. They existed above the shroud of the City's smog and the cage of its architecture, visible only in fragments and only to those who had already paid the price of looking. Most people learned, early and irrevocably, not to look.
It was the oldest story in the world. Icarus had flown too high. The sun had melted his wings. The sea had swallowed him. Do not reach. Do not aspire. Do not fly. The sky belonged to the sun, and the sun did not share. Every child in the City knew this lesson. The fall was inevitable. The only question was when.
But if Kamina had stood in Icarus's place, the story would have ended differently.
He would have flown toward the sun with the same reckless, brilliant grin he wore into every fight and every impossible situation. The heat would not have stopped him. The fear would not have found purchase. He would have climbed higher and higher, his wings shedding feathers of molten wax, and when he finally reached the burning heart of that distant star, he would not have been consumed. He would have touched it. And in that moment of contact, the sun would have recognized something equal to itself. A peer. Kamina would have burned brighter than the sun in the starry sky, his light outshining every constellation, and the heavens themselves would have been forced to acknowledge him.
He would become the brightest star in the sky. He refused to be anything less.
And that was why he would not let the children's curiosity die. The world would tell them to stop reaching. The world would tell them that the telescope was too dangerous, that the truth was too heavy, that the stars were not for eyes like theirs. The world had told that lie to every generation before them, and every generation had believed it, and the sky had remained dark and silent and untouchable. But Kamina had never believed a lie the world told him. He had never accepted that the impossible was anything more than a wall waiting for the right angle. The children wanted to look at the sky, and the sky had broken a man's mind for the offense. That was the cruelty of the world, and Kamina had made a life out of defying that cruelty.
He would stand between the children and whatever the telescope showed them. He would catch them if they fell. And if the universe tried to punish their curiosity the way it had punished every curious soul before them, it would have to go through him first.