1. Nabuk Street Tem­ple
In a swel­ter­ing class­room on the sec­ond floor of Libri’s Nabuk Street Tem­ple, Gil

 

An Akka­dian boy, shy and scrawny, about 14 years old. He has lived in Libri for as long as he can remem­ber, raised in the Tem­ple orphan­age. He almost never takes off his worn-out robe.

is one of a few kids who is not sleep­ing.

It’s pos­si­ble the instruc­tor, an elderly Akka­dian priest­ess with scrag­gly white hair, is will­ing to excuse her mostly sleep­ing class­room in light of the swel­ter­ing heat. But more likely, the priestess—nearly blind with cataracts—doesn’t notice.

Gil is doo­dling a pic­ture of a giant ser­pent devour­ing a stick fig­ure on his tablet. On the bench next to him is his friend Kiddu.

 

Gil’s best friend for sev­eral years now. They grew up together in the Tem­ple orphan­age. She is con­sid­er­ably less fussy about her appear­ance than many of the other girls in school.

Sur­pris­ingly, for once, she is not one of the sleep­ing kids. In fact, she’s lean­ing towards the edge of her bench, lis­ten­ing intently to the priest­ess’ lec­ture.

Priest­ess Matreya
…can any­one name the known prop­er­ties of haz­aram? Any­one? Any­one? What are the prop­er­ties of the for­saken mat­ter?

Kiddu shrinks back a lit­tle bit, still star­ing. Nobody says any­thing.

Priest­ess Matreya
Yes, I see. For once, your silence is not unwarranted—for nobody has seen haz­aram in ages. We merely have his­tor­i­cal records. But from these records, we can con­clude that haz­aram refers to an earthen mate­r­ial that is either wholly reflec­tive or wholly trans­par­ent and col­or­less. So you see, haz­aram inter­acts with light in a way that is dif­fer­ent from ordi­nary mat­ter, which absorbs at least some of the light that hits…

And so on. Gil phases it out, as he’s known about haz­aram since he was lit­tle. He won­ders about Kiddu, so he scratches out a note to her on his tablet:

what’s up with you?
why are you act­ing so inter­ested?

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