Yes, some teenage passions are superficial; but some are boundlessly-breathlessly- ardently transformative. In the blink of an eye or as slow as ice melting, your heart can be changed/lost/found forever.

The way I fell in love with Zillif over the following days. Evolving from apprehension about a woman on my roof, to casual interest in the patient I’d dropped off at the Circus, then metamorphosing into love, love, love.

Not sexual love. Not puppy love. Capital-R Romantic love, longing to vanquish enemies in her name, hanging on her slur-tongued words as if they were perfume that went straight to my brain.

What did we talk about? The sun when it shone, the moons when they rose, my friends, her grandchildren, the wildflowers I picked one afternoon near the town’s dump of mine tailings…

But mostly we talked about the Vigil. I wanted to hear everything. (Everything all at once.)

Nine hundred years earlier, the first Oolom colony on Demoth had been founded by a Divian billionaire who wanted to show the world he could design a Utopia. Scary idea, that. But the man did have one good idea: the Vigil. A constitutionally entrenched organization for watchdogging the government. Empowered to open any government file no matter how secret, to interrogate public officials from the lowliest sewer worker to the Speaker-General, to scrutinize every department and bureau and commission and regulation board that operated on any jurisdictional level: federal, territorial, trade region, or municipal. To monitor all the politicians, bureaucrats, consultants… and to report unflinchingly when any of those petty emperors had no clothes.