Lictor draws back his hand and clenches it into a fist. ”There, now we’re not in a hurry anymore. We can relax for a bit.”

  Nothing on his face tells me he’s relaxing. And why would he, because nothing happened? He pushes back his cowl and walks away from the pyramid. He drags me behind him for a couple of steps before I let go of his hand.

  ”Keep up. I’ll use this Ride to explain everything and you get to practice meeting them for the first time.”

  He’s striding along the hall toward a small door in the corner. I catch up to him and use the opportunity to look him over. He’s maybe twenty years older than me, his head already balding, and what hair is left is wispy and greying. His small eyes stare out from his face, piercing and dark. He resembles an angry pig. I feel bad for thinking that way, but what can you do? The boars I’ve hunted have been clever, strong and dangerous, so maybe it’s not an insult.

  Lictor pushes open a door. There’s a small room, with a clerk sitting on the other side of a desk. The man looks up and smiles, an easy smile, like seeing a friend. He looks young, maybe the same age as Hendrik. He puts his quill into an inkpot, being careful not to smudge his papers with his sleeve. ”Oh! Welcome back, sir Janitor. Found your man, eh?”

  Lictor grunts and walks past him.

  ”Done for the day?” the clerk shouts after us.

  Lictor keeps walking. I follow him, but take a final look at the clerk. His brow is creased in worry or confusion as he watches us go. Lictor rounds a corner and makes a gesture. There’s a muted flash of blue light around his hand and a metallic snap from a hidden lock of the door ahead of us. There’s no handle, but the door yawns open by itself and Lictor marches in.

  I keep following. What else can I do?

  Inside, there’s a small room with no other exits than the door we came in from. The room is furnished with a couple of couches and a table with a platter heaped with different fruits. The furniture is nothing like what we have in the village—dark, polished wood and deep purple velvet, not something put together from planks and furs.

  Lictor plops down on a couch. Finally, he seems to relax a bit. He runs a hand over his eyes and waves at the table. ”Eat. If you enjoy it.”

  ”Um, I just ate, thanks.”

  Lictor gives me a look. He squints again and raises a finger into the air. ”Consider the words I said. It doesn’t matter if you don’t need to eat at the moment. It only matters if you feel eating might be fun.”

  He watches me in silence. I don’t get it, but maybe it doesn’t matter. ”I guess I could eat some for dessert?” I say finally.

  ”Go ahead. They’re all excellent.”

  I pick up a small fruit unlike any I’ve seen before. It’s brown and wrinkled and smells sweet. I bite down on it and yelp as there’s a pit inside. My teeth crack down on it and the crunch sends chills down my spine. The flesh of the fruit is sweet and sticky as honey, but pungent. I carefully take out the pit from my mouth. It sticks to my fingers as I look for a suitable place to put it so it won’t cause a mess.

  Lictor lifts his hand and flicks his fingers over his shoulder. ”Throw it somewhere.”

  The polished stone floor is pristine. It reflects the soft magical light shining from above and I hesitate with the sticky pit in my hand.

  ”It doesn’t matter. Toss it. Eat as many as you like. Eating too many will work either as a laxative or cause you to get constipated, but that, also, doesn’t matter.”

  I put the pit onto the table, rubbing my fingertips against each other. ”I enjoy eating, but I don’t enjoy constipation.” My cheeks flush after saying that. Why did I say that?

  Lictor raises his finger up at me again. He leans in closer and points the finger at me. His small eyes focus on mine in a way that hasn’t happened before and the edges of his eyes crinkle. ”That’s the point. You don’t have to care about the consequences here. Making a mess, having a tummy ache tomorrow. It doesn’t matter when you’re on a Ride.”

  I frown.

  ”When I touched the Mountain Ride, you were holding on to me. That means we’re both on the same Ride,” he says and takes a breath to continue talking.

  Finally something familiar. Lille often used the same style with us: first the demonstration, then the lecture. I lean back and relax to listen.

  ”The artifact lets you experience the next 24 hours and then come back. Find and try things out. Practice a discussion. Try something risky. Once the time is over, you return to the exact moment you touched the pyramid the first time.” Lictor picks up a spiky fruit of some kind from the platter and shows it to me. ”This is poisonous. One bite and you’re dead instantly. And it’s not a fruit, it’s a gland from a certain teratome. One exists. Once we’re done, you can eat it.”

  Eat a gland of a teratome? ”I don’t think so.”

  ”Uh-huh, because that’s the quick way out.” He wags a finger at me. “If you die on a Ride, you get booted out. You don’t have to wait for the whole day. Or maybe you do, but it doesn’t matter, as you’re dead. Dead, dead, dead.” He singsongs the last words and chuckles.

  He jumps the spiky thing on his hand like it was a marble.

  He throws it high and catches it inside his fist, turning to face me straight on. ”Consequences don’t exist when you’re on a Ride. This is the ultimate meaning of that. If you’d picked this as the first thing to taste from the platter, I would have let you.” He leans forward, reaches with his fist, and lets the thing drop onto my lap. ”The difference would have been that I need to take you on another Ride and that the explanation might have been easier for you to believe.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  ”You…” I try to put the thoughts together. ”You mean you would have let me kill myself to prove a point?”

  ”I would have killed you to prove a point if it would work on you. It doesn’t, though. You’re too uptight for that.” He pouts and leans back on the couch.

  The spiky thing sits on my lap. I swipe it away and it shoots into the corner.

  Lictor’s face doesn’t move, but he lifts his palm toward me in a placating gesture. ”I’m sorry. Being a Janitor does things to your sense of normality. I’ve lived this day now about eight hundred and fifty times. I’ve had this discussion nine times. This is important, but I want to keep this relatively natural, so I haven’t gone through this as many times as I normally would have.”

  He leans forward and reaches his hand to sift through the fruits on the table. He picks up an ordinary apple and bites into it. He takes another bite and throws the rest of the apple over his shoulder. It hits the floor somewhere behind him with a soft crack. ”The Mountain Ride is primarily used to keep Tenorsbridge safe. There are limits to its use. The main one being that you only have a day to travel to where you need to go. And that distance is going to become much shorter, very soon. That’s why we have been in such a hurry.”

  ”Wait, wait. You’re still going too fast.” I grab a cherry from the table and roll it around in my fingers. Lille said that the Janitors are something new. The Ride thing must have appeared first and then they used that to organize the Janitors. When was that? I put the cherry into my mouth, speaking around it. “How old is the Mountain Ride?”

  ”Two days.”

  The stem of the cherry drops from my lip. She didn’t say they were this new. But if I believe what he’s saying, it doesn’t matter that they’ve had it for two days. They could have spent weeks trying it out.

  No, wait. Much longer.

  I do the math. My stomach drops. ”You’ve been living this day for over two years?!”

  Lictor raises an eyebrow and picks up a pear. He bites into it, wrinkles his nose, and lets the pear drop to the ground. ”I always forget I don’t like that one. Anyway, yes. Approximately. Obviously, some rides don’t last the whole day. This day has been much faster than the first day. I’m the fifth War Janitor. Three have retired already. One has died.”

  ”Two days? How long was the first day?”

  ”Collectively, maybe a decade.”

  I nearly choke on a grape at that. I hack and cough and miss the opportunity to ask anything.

  His eyes start wandering and he keeps talking over my coughing. “We had a lot to do. I won’t go into details of how we got the artifact. That’s not something you need to know. The relevant thing you have to understand, and internalize, is that no amount of planning and preparation is too much anymore. We used the first day researching, planning, building and perfecting the whole system. Recruiting the perfect people to be Janitors.”

  I finally manage to catch my breath and raise an eyebrow at that. The way Lille often did to me, when she felt I was feeling too confident for my own good.

  ”It’s not a boast,” he says quietly. He lowers his gaze to his hands and rubs his fingertips against each other. ”Being a Janitor requires a very certain kind of personality, who can tolerate things that would drive most people insane.” There’s a tone in his voice that sounds like he’s reciting something from memory. ”You have to be physically suitable for using the Mountain Ride repeatedly, more than anyone else normally does.”

  Maybe it doesn’t matter if I believe or understand this part. At least he’s not trying very hard to sell it. Perhaps he knows that I will get it. Or that I won’t? I start to understand why Lille was so angry at them. Talking with a Janitor is not something I would do for fun.

  He cranes his head back and his eyes stop at something on the ceiling. I look up, but there’s nothing there.

  ”The reason why we are in a hurry and why you are here is that we’re at war.” He lowers his gaze from the ceiling and fixes it on me. “We’ve been attacked. Ruthlessly, without any restraint or mercy. Whole of Velonea will be razed and burned, and its people massacred, unless we stop it.”

  ”What! Attacked? By whom?”

  ”Kerthar. And before you say anything, yes, I’m sure. No, there is no reason. We don’t know why. And the attack began four days ago. Word hasn’t spread yet, but it will.”

  I sit, stunned. I’ve never been further than the forest around the village, but I know of Kerthar. Gran taught us about the world and Kerthar was always just a far-away place somewhere to the east of the continent. A decent, normal place, by all accounts. ”Why would Kerthar attack…” I stop mid-sentence. Lictor already answered the question. I lower my face into my hands and rub my eyes and brow.

  ”Because you’re the best we could find. And believe me, we spent a good time searching.”

  That would have been my next question. The answer makes my cheeks flush with pride, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. I scratch my ear and lick my lips. I have to ask. ”There are many better hunters in the village. Faster, stronger, more experienced. Why not Lille or Ral?”

  ”You’re not yet taking into account what I told you earlier. Think it through.”

  I stop and bite my lip. He has already leaned back and is again shifting through the fruits. He picks up one thing at a time and considers it, before placing it back or into his mouth. I might as well not exist. ”I’m here… because I’m the best specifically for what you need to get done,” I start. ”Not because I’m necessarily the best in any sort of general or other way?” Saying it doesn’t come easy, even though I know it has to be the answer.

  He keeps picking at the fruit.

  ”You have something very particular that needs to be done, and maybe you’ve tried to get Lille or Ral or one of the adult hunters in the village to do it, but it didn’t work out. They wouldn’t even know you’ve done it.”

  ”Correct.” He doesn’t look up.

  I reach for an apple. They look amazing. Everything on the table does. I take a bite and chew until I’ve collected my thoughts. ”You said you’ve already had this discussion, too. I’ve already accepted the mission, maybe even tried to do it. Because of that, I’m here for real.”

  ”For real, good way to put it,” he says and rubs his hands together. ”Now we can get to work.”

  I’ve scooted to the edge of my seat, leaning toward Lictor. He’s still rubbing his hands and now faces me again. ”We have been gathering a team. You’re the last member. We know you’ll fit in… well, we know you’ll work well together with the rest, might be more accurate.”

  It’s probably true. I’ve always been good at working with others. Helping where I can, staying out of the way when I can’t. Even Lille has said as much. ”I see.” I take another bite out of the apple.

  ”You will,” he says. ”I like you. I like all of you. You’re brave. Selfless. Ready to do the right thing. That’s why you have been chosen.”

  His voice rises from his chest, thick with pride. His mouth is firm but his eyes soft. I want to believe him, but I remember Lille’s warning about the Janitors and how they always know what to say. His tone is swinging all over the place, though. How is this him knowing what to say?

  ”You’re too much in your own head. This far into the day, it’s very hard to orchestrate anything. There are too many variables, too many minuscule actions, that can shift how things will play out. At the moment, I have no advantage.”

  I shake my head. He sounds sincere. What the hell. I don’t really have a choice at this point. I know I’m going to do whatever mission they have for me. Not because they are making it happen, but because I know myself. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I might as well embrace it.

  Lictor suddenly stands up. ”I think you’re ready. We can go meet the others. Then I’ll show you what we’re up against.”