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“The immigrant Kwen’s greatest vice—graver in my estimation than his predisposition to sloth, slow-wittedness, and addiction—is his slavish attachment to the primitive culture of his origin.

In this treatise, I will enumerate my criticisms of contemporary Kwen integration policies; namely their focus on housing and employing Kwen without instilling in them the moral virtues that give rise to an industrious life.

The only Kwen who can hope to responsibly handle gainful employment or civilized living quarters is the one who has first committed himself to good Tiranish ideals. By contrast,

the Kwen who holds to the ways of the wild is a wretched creature, a curse unto himself more than anyone else. I have in my heart tremendous pity for the lonely and prospectless Kwen who cannot assimilate, and I believe we do him no favors by allowing him to persist in his backward ways.”

- Archmage Theredes Orynhel, A

Treatise on the Compassionate Assimilation of Kwen Peoples (284 of Tiran)

I T

HAD

BEEN years since Sciona set foot in the Berald family bakery.

Usually, she just rushed past it on her way to the train.

The warmth and the honey-glazed smell took her straight back to when she had been a child, shyly clutching Aunt Winny’s skirts as her aunt told her she could pick out one sweet treat. Just one, so choose carefully.

“Morning, Ansel,” Sciona greeted the baker’s son as she set her basket on the counter.

“I’d like some blueberry scones, if you have them.

” Those were Thomil’s favorite—or at least, the ones that disappeared the fastest when Sciona brought baked goods into the lab.

It occurred to her that she had never asked him outright what he’d like her to bring from the bakery.

She had just thought he was lucky that she was considerate enough to share with him. Ha!

“Are you alright?” Ansel asked, and Sciona realized that there was an unhinged smile hanging on her lips, her hair was an unwashed mess, and she likely looked as though she hadn’t slept in days—which was nearly the case.

After the doctor had cleared out, she had passed out on her bed for a few hours.

Alba and Winny would have liked her to sleep longer, she knew, but after Alba left for work and Winny left for the morning market, she had taken her opportunity to escape the apartment.

“Miss Sciona?”

“Yes.” She shook herself. “Sorry. You asked a question?”

“How many?”

“Huh?”

“How many scones?”

“Oh, right. As many as you have. Or as many as you can fit in this basket.”

“Miss Sciona…” Ansel paused after picking up his tongs. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I’ve been better,” she said, knowing she would never sell ‘fine’ with her eyes as puffy as they were.

“Well, my Ma always says there’s nothing a delicious bake can’t fix.

” Ansel had a contented look on his broad, simple face as he transferred the blueberry scones from the display case into the basket.

Sciona had a vague memory of his big brother greeting customers from behind the same display.

Carseth had been even taller than Ansel and just as kind—a big, contented tower, all warmth and strength.

“Ansel, I’m going to ask you a question that isn’t nice at all.”

“Um—alright?”

“Why did your brother kill himself?”

Ansel fumbled, nearly dropping a scone on its way to the basket. “Sorry—what?”

“I told you it wasn’t nice.” But she needed to know.

“No, it-it’s fine.” He glanced around, but there was no one else in the bakery. Sciona had purposely come between the morning and lunchtime influxes of customers when the place would be quiet. “I just… I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me about it quite so bluntly.”

“He was a barrier guard, right?”

“Only for six months. He meant to make a career there. The pay’s good, you know, and he wanted to support our parents.”

“My Aunt Winny says he left home a happy, ambitious man and came back different.”

Ansel didn’t meet Sciona’s eyes as he placed the last scone in the basket and folded the cloth over them. “She’s not wrong.”

“What happened?”

“Carseth wasn’t supposed to talk about it.” Ansel lowered his voice. “He—well, you know better than most of us how government jobs can be. Confidentiality and all that.”

“I do.”

“So, you know that if I tell you, you have to promise not to share it with anyone else.”

“On my honor as a mage.”

“Alright.” Ansel leaned a little closer. “After Carseth came back home, he talked about refugees—Kwen folk—coming through the barrier torn up, covered in blood.”

“Torn up?” Sciona repeated.

“I won’t say how he actually put it. Not to a lady.”

“Tell me how he actually put it,” Sciona demanded and then added, “please.”

“Well, Carseth said they had pieces of their limbs missing, skin peeled back from the muscle, muscle peeled back from bone, just…” Ansel shuddered.

“The stuff of nightmares. Stuff so horrible you couldn’t make it up if you tried.

At first, he thought it was cannibals or wild animals, but after a while, he found out it was something else. ”

“What was it?” Sciona already knew, of course. She was just wondering how much a simple man like Ansel had inferred.

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it was all confidential. He really shouldn’t have been telling us about anything he saw at the barrier. He was just in such a state; I don’t think he even remembered the rules.”

“And you think that was why he killed himself?” Sciona whispered softly. “Because of the injuries he saw?”

“No. That wasn’t the thing—or the only thing—that really tormented him.”

“Then why?”

“Just that… I guess if the injured Kwen couldn’t be helped or if the camps were at capacity, guards were ordered to throw them back outside the barrier.”

“They what?” Sciona had suspected as much, but hearing it confirmed still made her blood run cold.

“Carseth wouldn’t do it. At least, that’s what he’d say when he woke in a cold sweat, screaming.

I won’t do it. I won’t do it… But whatever he did or didn’t do, it seems like he watched other guards throw Kwen back through the barrier.

And whatever happened to them then, whatever my brother saw…

he couldn’t take it. After a year of us trying to get him back into the rhythm of the bakery and Doctor Mellier trying to help him, he still just…

” Ansel shook his head and blinked tears from his eyes.

Then he sniffed sharply. “Sorry. God, look at me.” He dabbed at his eyes with his apron, leaving smudges of flour on his cheeks. “Crying like a girl.”

“It’s alright,” Sciona said. “I do it all the time.”

That got a little laugh out of the baker’s son.

“And Ansel, I’m sorry I brought it up.” She wasn’t, of course. She had needed to have this suspicion confirmed. ‘Sorry’ just seemed like the thing to say.

Ansel sniffed. “Miss Sciona, I don’t want you to think my brother was a lunatic or a coward. He—”

“I know he wasn’t,” Sciona said seriously. “He was a good soul, who saw things no good soul could process.”

“You really think so?”

“I do.” Perhaps what Carseth had done—how he had ended it—was the only thing a good person could do faced with the reality of the barrier.

Thank God Sciona’s ego superseded her heart.

She needed something more than an impotent, bloody end on the cobbles beneath her window.

She needed action. But that certainly didn’t make her a better—or stronger—person than Carseth Berald. “He wasn’t weak. He was a good person.”

“You sound so sure,” Ansel said thickly. “How are you so sure?”

Sciona answered honestly because she knew the baker’s son would not understand, and she needed to test her own courage—to see if she had the strength to say the truth aloud.

“Because the space beyond the barrier is a Reserve siphoning zone. And the Reserve siphons continuously.” A guard who saw people thrown back through the barrier would have to watch Blight eat them alive. It was no wonder a simple, sweet person like Ansel’s brother had lost his mind.

“What do you—”

Before Ansel could ask any of his own questions, Sciona reached out and touched his hand. It was awkward. But it turned out to be the right move as the baker’s son was struck dumb, their entire conversation seemingly forgotten as he looked down at the hand on his.

“Thank you.” She squeezed gently. “For the scones and for sharing with me.”

The barrier cast enough light to see by in the long twilight of winter days, but the absence of working streetlamps still made the Kwen Quarter alarmingly dark.

Sciona had to squint at the slip of paper on which she had scrawled the address from the recesses of the university’s staff directory.

She had never gotten off the train in this part of town, believing Aunt Winny’s claims that she would be robbed or kidnapped.

Standing on a platform crawling with rats and beggars, she saw where people got that idea, as well as where they got the idea that Kwen didn’t bathe.

An acrid soup of smells washed the quarter—some combination of urine, chemical smoke, and rotting garbage.

Sciona hadn’t worn her best skirts, but she still picked them up high as she made her way among the towering apartment complexes where families lived crushed together in squalor.

She had to gather the fabric right up to her knees to keep it from catching when she climbed the rusting metal stairs up the outside of Thomil’s building.

By the time she reached the door, she was sweating through her blouse, but she smoothed her skirts in an attempt to look presentable before lifting a fist to the faux wood and giving a crisp knock.