Strange Investigations

In Utopia, everybody has someone she healed. Nobody talks to the Authorities.

Niobe runs an investigations office three floors above a fence's shop. Her partner, Angelo, is gray, unhurried, and older than he says. Then the Warden puts her on retainer and slides a folder across the table: a case in Sanctuary, the refuge city at the hub of the Known Worlds, in festival week. Something about pets. It is not about pets. Four hundred travelers have walked into a door and not come out.

Sanctuary takes anyone. It keeps no register of blood or history. It was built that way on purpose, three hundred years ago, by eight founders who put their hands on a bare hill under two moons and did not get up. Under its chapel floor, the rock has been warm ever since. Since the solstice, something down there has been awake.

Niobe has four days, a Chancellor who will not be asked, a boy who eats light fixtures, and a partner who has kept one secret longer than she has been alive. She also has hands that mend whatever they touch, and no idea what that costs.

Someone else does.