Koldin glanced into the passage again. Nothing moved there except a pair of shirts hanging from a line.

“You can report it to zhe polis.”

The shopkeeper laughed once. It was not a cheerful sound.

Koldin understood the response.

The local police might take the report. They might write the description into a book already swollen with descriptions. If they recognized the thief they might visit him later, provided they were not related to him and he had not already shared the liquor with them. More likely the bottle would join all the other missing objects in Lenkerk, translated from property into anecdote by the passage of time.

“You report it,” the shopkeeper said. “They listen to you.”

“Sometimes.”

“Then tell them.”

Koldin considered this.

The patrol route already passed the police post near the central market. He could mention it. The officer behind the desk would nod and ask whether there had been violence. Koldin would say no. The officer would become relieved and therefore less interested.

“I’ll tell zhem.”

The shopkeeper looked dissatisfied but lacked an alternative.

“You people guard the mine.”

“Yes.”

“But not my shop.”

“Zhat appears to be zhe arrangement.”

The man muttered something in Tilmuhlan and began rearranging the bottles. Koldin caught enough of it to know that House Ivenmoth, Olissingen, the VSEA, and his immediate ancestors had all disappointed him in distinct ways.

Koldin did not object. He continued down the road.

The failed pursuit left his breathing slightly elevated. He drank from one of the bottles after opening it with the frame of his pistol and managed to partially recap it. The pads on his hands had already developed a layer of sweat. His ears remained turned backward for several minutes, listening for running footsteps that never came.

Nothing important had happened.

A bottle had changed owners without consent. A shopkeeper had been made poorer by a small amount. A thief would drink, sell, or trade what he had taken. The polis would perhaps be informed. The machinery of order would receive the incident and convert it into paper, then store the paper somewhere beyond the reach of consequence.

Koldin had once believed that peacekeeping meant preventing disorder. Years of doing it had taught him otherwise.

Disorder was the natural condition. It seeped through walls and climbed fences and entered through gaps no regulation had anticipated. The work consisted mostly of limiting its ambitions.

At the edge of the eastern road, a sign leaned toward the ditch. Beyond it lay the freight yards, the water stand, and the low perimeter of the old airport.

Koldin adjusted the golok and walked on.

Behind him the old woman rolled cigarettes on her porch. The baxxid carried the baskets. The thief vanished into town with the bottle against his ribs.

The day had begun to accumulate its minor failures.

Back at the base the medical wing had awakened fully.

It occupied one end of a long low building whose windows had been screened twice over and whose walls had been painted white often enough that the paint had begun to resemble sediment. The corridor smelled of boiled cloth, rubbing alcohol, old sweat, and the medicinal sweetness of compounds kept cold in metal cabinets. Two ceiling fans turned above the examination room. One revolved faster than the other and moved less air around.

Mehrab stood beneath them with a pencil held upright between two claws.

He was a yinglet of dull orange fur and remarkably bright white eyes, the latter made more conspicuous by the sleepless darkness beneath them. He wore the same olive-green fatigues issued to the rest of the VSEA, though a medical symbol had been sewn above one breast pocket and the name MEHRAB above the other. The stitching was newer than the shirt.

Across from him sat a human recently arrived from the Heart.

The man was young and large through the shoulders and had the pink, unfinished look of someone whose skin had not yet learned what the Tilmuhlan sun intended to do to it. His uniform was clean. His boots were clean. Even the seams of his haversack remained pale. He had been in Lenkerk for less than a day and already appeared faintly damp.

“Keep your head still,” Mehrab said.

The recruit nodded.

“Don’t nod. Just do it.”

Mehrab moved the pencil slowly from left to right. The human’s eyes followed. He brought it nearer, then farther away, watching the pupils converge and separate. The man tried to anticipate the direction of movement.

“Follow it,” Mehrab said. “Don’t hunt it.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

The recruit stopped hunting it.

Mehrab set down the pencil and took a small electric light from the tray. Its casing was green metal and warm from repeated use. He thumbed it on and directed the beam into one eye, then the other. The pupils narrowed cleanly.

“Look at zhe wall.”

The man looked past him.

Mehrab moved the light again and watched the response. No delay. No unevenness. No sign that the journey south had injured anything besides the man’s expectations.

He switched off the light.

“Stand.”

The recruit stood.

The examination room seemed to diminish around him. He was twice Mehrab’s mass and tall enough that the top of his head approached the slowly turning fan. Mehrab stepped backward and pointed at a strip painted along the floor.

“Heel to toe. End of zhe room and back.”