Elodiz liked a lot of hotels in Ceriz, especially the ones on the water because he could watch the lake fowl spawning. Spring was a busy time at the waterfront, and for three weeks every year, all water traffic ceased to accommodate them. The lake fowl courted, mated, and laid their eggs at the bottom of the lake. Two weeks later—so long as they weren’t overfed by overzealous children—the slimy, squawking larva emerged, halfway between gory amphibian and arrogant fowl. They grew quickly and took flight just a week later, but the arrival of the whales was the real spectacle. The whales hibernated the whole year long at the bottom of lakes. They came up for a single week and gorged themselves fat to sustain themselves for another year of hibernation. The whales were tremendous things, each the length of a trolley with great feathered frills around their wedged heads. In the spring, the harbor was full of the sounds of their chattering language: a series of whistles, pops, and water thumping with the front two of their eight flippers.

  They were fully sentient animals, eerily so. When a few citizens occasionally gabbled about why we stopped traffic in a lake with whales in it every year, the city elders reminded them that the whales had been here longer than we had and the alternative to allowing them three weeks to feed and breed was to murder them all and then what would we be then? We would be no better than our Enemy.

  One season I met with Elodiz at one of the hotels, a grand, old pre-war building with fanciful leering faces on the façade. The faces were meant to be jolly, I think, but the art style of the time depicted people with bony features and starved bodies. There were few portraits that did not emphasize the bones of the skull beneath, painting all skin as slightly translucent.

  He and I stood out on the balcony watching the fish while two of my sisters bickered over the breakfast cart in the room behind us. Sometimes Elodiz would take a few of us out with him on business like this so each of his children got to spend time with him and meet the various magistrates and politically powerful people who we might need to make an impression on later in life.

  I was only ten at the time, though, so I saw these ventures as little more than great fun. An excuse to eat rich food from a hotel cart and spend time with my senior father.

  We watched the whales on the beach below. They were clever, those whales. Though they ate many of the larval foul, most often they used the larva to bait the much larger adults. The whales would slide up onto the shore and deposit an injured baby lake fowl there, and six or seven adults would swoop and circle and crowd in to defend it, and then the whale would slide back up onto the beach and swallow one of the adults whole.

  This seems, in retrospect, to be a strange pastime for our people, to watch this dance of death and rebirth every year at the lake. But Elodiz said he found it very cathartic.

  “What’s happening in the lake below is just like our lives with the Enemy,” he had said, “only time is compressed. It’s like watching the whole cycle sped up.”

  “But the whales aren’t evil,” I told him, already firm in my sense of fairness and justice at that age. “They’re just doing what they need to do to survive.”

  “Yes, they are,” Elodiz said and he reached down and smoothed my hair and crossed my forehead for luck. “Sometimes we must do terrible things just to survive, Ahgazin.”

  I remembered that day well.

  I also remembered the grim, skeletal façade of the hotel.

  Zin hesitated on the steps of the Hotel Savazan, struck by how the bony, grimacing figures leering at her from its exterior looked both more and less terrifying than they had when she was ten. Merriz was already at the door, his hand on a handle carved to look like a femur. Zin had taken her fair share of anatomy classes during basic training—it was supposed to make the soldiers more effective killer—and found that she could name the types of bones decorating the archway, too: metatarsals, fibula, patella, two sacrums, a coccyx …

  “This the right one?” Merriz said. He wore smoked glasses now, though the day was so overcast that the sky hardly seemed to change during the sun’s multiple rotations. The black dust of the winter season had blown in a few hours before, two weeks ahead of usual. Zin expected to see a lot of angry farmers in the news on the counter display at dinner.

  “It’s the right one,” she said. “Let me go around to the other side. As soon as you ask for him at the front, he’ll bolt.”

  “They can’t legally announce our presence,” he said.

  She raised her brows. “Elodiz is very convincing. He’s known the people who run all these hotels for years. Why do you think nobody’s turned him in yet?”

  “I won’t know what room he’s in unless I ask,” he said.

  “I might know,” she said. “Let’s try meeting up there first. Highest floor, center room facing the lake. It’s his preferred room. If he isn’t there, we ask and have a brawl just like you want.”

  “I don’t always want a brawl.”

  She made a noncommittal grunt and waved at him. She went around the back of the hotel and through the lush gardens. The great, bountiful faces of the blue margonias were already drooping. Soon they would wither and become clotted with fungi. Most gardens became fungal havens during the winter season: dying flora, darker skies, and the invisible but radiant heat of the winter star made conditions perfect for them.

  Zin pulled off her red coat and left it on the banister. Without the coat, she looked slightly less like a Justicar. She couldn’t imagine anyone would recognize her—Elodiz was the senior father of a household with two dozen children and none of them had become politically powerful. Elodiz had wanted to make them all into well-connected politicians, but most, like Zin, found they preferred community organizing and military service to politics.

  Zin came to the end of the hall on the third floor. Merriz was already waiting at the other end. They met each other at the door emblazoned with a black tulip. Her father’s preferred room.

  Merriz, too, had taken off his jacket.

  “You knock,” Zin said, taking out her truncheon.

  “You think he’ll fight? He’s a politician. They never fight.”

  “Just being cautious,” she said. “He may not even be here.”

  Merriz snorted. How arrogant, she thought as Merriz raised his hand, that Elodiz would have hidden here in plain sight, confident that the many people he had befriended over the years would continue to shield a man who committed some of the war’s greatest crimes.

  The door opened immediately, so fast Zin flinched, instinctively bringing up her truncheon.

  A young woman stood at the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “He’s been expecting you.”

  Merriz raised a brow at Zin and smirked his usual “I told you so” look. He strode in ahead of her. Zin kept her truncheon out.

  They followed the young woman into the large suite. Windows overlooking the lake made up the whole rear wall. She saw Elodiz’s familiar portly form there at the glass, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a plain white robe and yellow linen jacket.

  He turned and smiled when he saw them. He looked much the same as he had during their last argument. Zin found it oddly unsettling. It was as if she had gone back in time, obliterating the last decade comprised of the final horrible push of the war and routing of the Enemy and the subsequent institution of the post-war protocol and Justice Commission.

  She pushed back her sense of dissonance and flicked her truncheon. “Elodiz Ta Muvard—” she began

  “Oh, save all of that rhetoric,” he said, waving at her. “I know what you’re here for. What baffles me is why my own daughter took this case.”

  “Not my choice,” she said. “Your name was in the file we were assigned. You were just one of the easier ones to find.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “When justice is done, we’ll have condemned fully ten percent of our own people.”

  “Yes, well—” Zin said.

  “You know who they move to next,” he said.

  “I’ve read the post-conflict protocol, yes.” She walked forward, gesturing for Merriz to pull out his restraints. Merriz took out the long curl of the stretchy bands.

  “And still you came for me, even knowing your own end,” Elodiz said. He did not present his hands to her, though she was now within four paces of him.

  Zin hesitated. What was he playing at? “Clearly, you expected me to be,” she said, “or you would have run further.”

  “Your Worship—” the young woman said and Zin winced.

  Elodiz waved a hand. “You go on, Jivoz,” he said. “I won’t have need of you. Thank you for your service.”

  The young woman burst into tears.

  “It’s all right now,” Elodiz said. “Come, this is the way of things.”

  She nodded and left the room.

  Merriz looked over the top of his glasses at Zin and cocked his head at Elodiz.

  Zin began again, “Elodiz Ta Muvard, the Justice Commission has found you guilty of collaboration with the enemy. You have the right to hear these charges in full on remanding yourself to custody today. Though your sentence is heretical death, this sentence may be commuted if you give a full confession of—”

  Elodiz snorted. “Who dares judge a god?”

  “You’re not a god,” Zin said. “You’re a human being. And we are judged by the communities that make our lives possible. The communities that feed and clothe us and care for us—”

  “It was not the community that did that,” he said. “It was me. I clothed you. I fed you. And the things I did ensured you are alive now to condemn me.”

  Zin said, “And how would you have cared for us without mastering a harbor built by public funds and free hands? How would you have reached our home without the roads built by civil servants and squabbling politicians? The freedom you sought by sacrificing the lives of others was not freedom at all. You sought power. There is no other name for it.”

  “You are self-righteous. You get that from your near-mother Caroliz, or perhaps your mother Mashiva, or your fallen mother Lizatia.”

  “No,” Zin said, “I got that from you.”

  Merriz stepped between them. “I’m sure you can both catch up back at the repository,” he said. “Family stuff, I know. You haven’t seen each other in a while. But let’s just get you downstairs, call a trolley and—”

  “You know the protocol, Elodiz,” Zin said. She tucked her truncheon into her belt and jerked the restraints from Merriz’s hands just as Elodiz turned and walked out onto the balcony. Zin sighed. “Father, please—”

  Just as she stepped up beside him, Elodiz took her by the back of the neck and propelled her to the edge of the balcony. Zin pin-wheeled her arms, dropping the restraints. He was her father, still, even now, and she was transported back to her girlhood when her father was always right. Her gut clenched and she found herself paralyzed with guilt for a full breath.

  He shoved her head toward the lake. “Look out there!” he said. “We never overfeed those lake fowl. The whales come back every year because we say we must preserve the process. But what is that process but another circle of life and death? Why don’t we take control of it, Zin? Why don’t we change it? They come and they go, every year, just like the Enemy. But always with them, and with our Enemy, we follow the same protocol. We enable the same cycle. We could be gods, and instead, we condemn ourselves each cycle. We condemn ourselves to be monsters.”

  She could have broken his grip. He was an old man, a politician, and she was a soldier. But she endured him because he was her father. “We are not gods,” she said.

  Merriz’s fist was fast. Zin heard the crunch as his punch met her father’s rib cage. Elodiz huffed out a cry and crumpled.

  “For fucks’ sake,” Merriz said. “Did you forget who you were?”

  Zin stared at the old man moaning on the ground between them. No,” she said. “I know who I am.” She raised her gaze to Merriz. “Do you, Merriz? Do you know what we are?”

  Many question the work of the Justice Commission. When wars end, collective amnesia is common in other countries. People forget the things that they did during war and they puff themselves up like paragons of virtue as if acts committed during war were somehow only committed by the aberrant, by the one percent of people believed to be truly monstrous. These sociopaths are far less common than many believe. Wars are not fought by sociopaths, they are fought by ordinary people. That’s what’s so frightening about them.

  The Justice Commission was created as part of the post-war protocol formed in the Second Age. After the Enemy had been turned back, everyone who had participated in the war had to make a public accounting of their crimes. Silence and forgetting would only deny the experiences of victims, deepening their trauma, and contribute to the mass delusion that the atrocities we committed during our wars were only perpetrated by a few. And, of course, if we forgot what we did, what we were capable of doing, to win the war each turn, then we would not be able to summon that horror within ourselves to fight again the next time. We could not forget how to make war because in another two hundred years we would need to unseal these records again and remember.

  In truth, when the war first started only ten percent of our troops would fire on the Enemy. Oh, they might light off cannons from a distance or catapult great gobs of burning pitch at ships, but when it came to shooting a weapon—dead or fungal—they found they could not aim and fire at another human being when they could make out that person’s face.

  You must train people to kill. And we did. Breaking open the records from the four Ages of uprisings before us helped. We saw what we had done. We knew what was possible.

  Other countries ask why we don’t keep our people trained for fighting between wars, but the truth is we are a peaceful country and you cannot build a peaceful country when half of its resources are dedicated to war. A country with an army will use it. You cannot train soldiers to deal out death and expect them to stop when they come home. When you train people to enjoy killing, they will kill, and they will look for ways to kill and ways to abuse that power, even when they come home. They will disrupt any attempt at peace.

  People trained in war will bring the war home.

  I learned this from parents. I learned this at school. I learned it even in basic training: a country of killers was not a country at all but a war machine, a snake always eating its tail. But it was not until a woman raised her hand during philosophy class the second week of basic training and asked the implicit question behind that knowledge that I considered what that meant.

  “If soldiers who have killed can never go home and create a peaceful society,” she said, “what happens to all of us after the war?”

  The instructor did not hesitate. “Our fates are sealed when the Commission disbands,” she said. “The protocol has clear instructions on what’s to be done with those who fought.”

  The great court theater was packed to bursting. Children had scrambled up onto the roof and were peering down around the edges of the great glass dome. The whirring of copper recording devices was a constant whine, noxious and distracting.

  Zin and Merriz, as the Justicars who had brought in the man on trial, sat just behind the prosecutor’s table. Merriz was chewing a gob of sap, which Zin would have found more insufferable if she could actually hear him chomping on it above the din of the recorders.

  When they brought Elodiz into the court theater a murmur rolled through the crowd. He stood in the raised box of the condemned.

  The prosecutor rose from her seat and read his four pages worth of crimes aloud to the court. “Do you admit to these crimes?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Elodiz said. “That’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it?”

  The prosecutor continued. “And on whose order did you commit these crimes?”

  “First Premier Torozina’s,” he said.

  “That would be the former First Premier Torozina,” the prosecutor said. “The leader of this country.”

  “Yes.”

  “And why would our country’s highest elected office ask you to commit these crimes?”

  “They were necessary to win the war.”

  “How so?”

  Elodiz grimaced. “How so? How do you think we turn them back every two hundred years? You think you can turn a country of pacifists into soldiers suddenly, after two centuries of peace? Soldiers must be inspired, prosecutor.”

  “So you undertook these acts of barbarism to … inspire people?”

  “No country wants war,” Elodiz said. “Why should some idiot commoner risk her life at the front when she can live out her life on her farm baking bread and fucking her husbands? It’s natural not to want war. No one wants it. We all understand that, do we not? But it is those who lead countries, who shape these policies, and it is always an easy thing to drag people along, no matter if it’s a pacifist or tyranny. The people can always be led about by the nose. It’s easy. Just tell them they’re being attacked by a grievous evil, by some nefarious, cannibalistic monster of a threat. Denounce the peacemakers for their lack of spine. Tell those on the fence that it is these pacifists who are putting us in real danger. Say they are endangering our freedom, and ultimately, our very existence. It works the same in every country, in every age.”

  The prosecutor nodded. “If you understood that these actions would condemn you by the laws of our country, why did you undertake them?”

  “I knew when this began that I would either go down as our history’s greatest hero, or its greatest villain,” Elodiz said.

  Zin snorted.

  Elodiz’s gaze moved to her. He jabbed a finger at Zin. “You think you’re better? You shoot people in the street for ‘war crimes.’ Crimes they committed at the behest of the state that resulted in the end of this war and the crushing of our enemies. You aren’t any better than me. You’re worse, in fact, because you don’t even know what you’re doing. You don’t even have the self-awareness to know what’s going on. But they will pin a medal to your chest right up until they ask you to murder yourself. And I’ll die a collaborator. Is it worth it?”