Yutten Turse in the style of German Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Yutten had been tempted to dive into a search for anything she could find about Benoit Canardo, but she held back. Instead of jumping into it, she had spent yesterday afternoon – and evening, until she was so tired she had to struggle to stay awake long enough to reach her bed – thinking about how to proceed.

  (One good thing about the Blight was that it was never difficult to fall asleep anymore.)

  It did strike her as something of a coincidence that Protectors were confiscating evidence dating back to an era of war 27 centuries ago just as another war had been declared for the first time in 15 centuries. She had no idea what to make of it.

  She had no experience with penetrating obfuscation and avoiding detection magics – except that occasion with Z?rgiebel a few days ago, of course – so she decided on a process of learning by doing. Move into it as carefully as possible and see if it is possible to learn something, she thought.

  General archivist magics should not trigger anything, so she set up a query into Glitter victims. Canardo was there.

  Why did they not obfuscate him? She thought about this. There would be other records – electronic media, probably a memorial somewhere. If some archivist or historian cross-checked records and found one person missing, that would stand out as interesting.

  Unless they could do something similar to the visual blurring, so that you would not notice the discrepancy. Could they do that? Maybe when you attempted to cross-check, you would fail to see that any information was missing – unless, she supposed, you did something very specific like counting the number of victims on both records.

  These possibilities annoyed her. Yutten was a Diviner. She believed in the truth. Lies were distasteful to her.

  Anyway, whether or not they could impose such a cognitive blur on things, they had not done so. Too risky, perhaps. Archivists and historians are meticulous people.

  She further narrowed her Divination query down – males only, Mikla only, a range of dates that happened to include those relevant for the Canardo case – and ended up with three people. Then she just sat there and looked for hidden things.

  Although she lacked experience with obfuscation magics specifically, she was quite skilled at finding hidden things in general. She looked and waited.

  It took several hours. She focused on maintaining awareness of this volume of magical space – the outcome space of her Divination engram – and eventually she realized there were certain patterns to it. Something almost entirely translucent was attached to one of the cases. She focused on this translucent something and waited.

  ---

  In the evening, she had dinner with her dad. He was a Diviner with a hotshot headquarters job, one of the perks of which was that he sometimes got tickets to highbrow cultural events. Stuff that he usually failed to take advantage of because he was too busy working, but tonight he had taken time off to treat his daughter first to a ten-course dinner at The Chalice – always fully booked, impossible to get a table – and then to a concert with the Nebula Collective.

  Yutten had dressed in her formal Diviner robe for the occasion, knowing that her dad would do the same and liked seeing her in it, although she never felt entirely comfortable wearing the clumsy thing. Or any kind of formal clothing for that matter.

  Diviner robes were white with silver streaks, crafted from a soft and light fabric that felt like silk, but which was actually based on spider web elastomers and would protect you, to some extent, from objects moving at high velocity. Unadorned and simple in design, the robes were intended to express purity, elegance, and truthfulness.

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  “Hi, dad,” Yutten said as she approached the indoors window table where he sat waiting, tuned into something on the ether and not especially aware of his surroundings.

  “Yutten! Great to see you. How is life?”

  “I’m alright.” She never told him about the cases she was working on, and he never asked. “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m working too much, as you know. It never ends.”

  “Yeah. And I’m always telling you to maybe look for a different job, and you always say you will think about it, and nothing ever happens. The administration is still incompetent?”

  “You’re right, as always. I’m never getting out of this prison, am I?”

  Yutten said nothing.

  “And yes, one of the reasons I can’t leave is that someone needs to keep that miserable place moving forward, and it’s not going to be the administration. It’s just extraordinary how disorganized they are.”

  “Mm. But you said that about the last administration as well. And the one before that, If I recall correctly. You have complained about the administration since you first got the job back when I was a teenager.”

  “I know, I know. Maybe I’m just expecting too much. Or, you know, maybe I turned into a disgruntled old guy who complains about everything. You think I complain too much?”

  “You’re not too bad, you just have thing against Diviner leadership. People complain about Z?rgiebel too, you know.”

  “I suppose you are right. We had such hopes for Salome when she took over, she seemed so talented. And then, I don’t know, it’s like that office just sucks the energy out of people, like it’s the damn Blight or something.”

  “Too much responsibility, maybe. All the demands turning people into caricatures of themselves. Anyway, you feel the Blight much?”

  “Yeah, don’t we all. I feel like I’m getting older every day. I’ll manage, though. How about you?”

  “It helps me fall asleep, I guess. Otherwise, I dunno, I’m not sure I know what to blame on the Blight and what to blame on life. I’m doing fine, actually.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. We got to hang in there, you know.”

  “I know. You think about her, much?”

  “Not a day goes by without it. It will always be painful for me. Like I let her down.”

  Yutten’s mother had suffered from severe depression. All the world’s Invoker shrinks had done their best, talk therapy and enhancements and what have you, but nothing ever worked for more than a short while.

  It was like, Yutten thought, feeling guilty about such thinking, that mother had really married her depression. She identified so closely with it that she could not let go of it, not without letting go of herself as well. And that she could never do, Yutten observed, feeling ungenerous.

  In the end, mother had gotten what she always wanted. An evok-invok team had arrived at the house, all dressed in gothpunk black, tattoos everywhere including the face. They set up a ritual circle, playing drums and chanting, the woman Blissing mother out of her mind and the man slowly decreasing her heartbeat until mother was no more. Yutten had refused to watch.

  “Me too. But there was nothing we could have done. You have to stop blaming yourself.” Mother was depressed, but she was also depressing to be around. Sometimes Yutten had to distance herself to protect her own mental health. But dad had always been there.

  “I wanted to be the knight on the white horse, you know. To the rescue.”

  “You tried your best. I wish it would have been enough, but the fact that it wasn’t does not mean it was your fault.”

  “You’re right, Yutten.” The sadness on his face made him look old and tired. “You’re stronger than me and I’m happy for that. Please take care of yourself. I couldn’t manage losing you too.”

  “I’m doing fine, dad. It’s more realistic that I’m going to lose you. You’re using work to escape from your feelings, and you’ve done it for many years. You should talk to an invok.”

  “I will. I promise. Let’s talk about something happier.”

  They ate the tiny dishes that kept arriving, all of which were excellent. The Chalice was sort of old-school, though. Everything was natural, organic, traditional – it was not the kind of place where they would invent something entirely new and different, where you could taste something you had never tasted before, something that maybe did not exist in the natural world.

  Yutten liked such adventures in unnatural esthetic pleasure, but she had to admit that sometimes the classics, having stood the test of time, proven their quality across the generations, just tasted better. At least at The Chalice.

  After dinner, Chalice staff Conveyed them over to the Soundsphere, which was an imposing spherical structure designed for perfect acoustics. Made of semi-translucent materials, its surface bathed in a soft, ethereal glow emanating from within.

  Yutten and her dad arrived at the nearby Conveyer node and, being slightly late, headed right for their seats without first visiting the cloakroom.

  One of Yutten’s favorite experiences was to enter the Soundsphere and be overwhelmed by the immensity of its open-yet-enclosed space, which somehow seemed sacred. It was like emerging from a dark cave into a wide-open vista, yet at the same time she felt protected and secure. The experience was often described as being simultaneously outside and inside, the architecture somehow transgressing against the natural distinction between spaciousness and enclosure.

  They had excellent seats. The Nebula Collective were eight musicians who blended ethereal soundscapes with powerful percussive rhythms, each flowing in and out of the picture in a sort of meta-rhythm that would sometimes elicit emotional depth and otherwise just present as weird or even jarring. But the disharmony was probably intended as a counterpoint to the intricate harmonies produced by the collective’s magically reinforced instruments, noise coalescing into signal before dissolving back into noise.

  Too clever by half but echoing the complex and often jarring emotions playing out inside Yutten; she found herself enjoying the music, and dad seemed to like it too.