"Kade, get up! They're not paying you to sleep!"

The teenager cringed as his mother's jarring voice carried to his room from downstairs. Grateful that she was probably late for work—she didn't get off for the holiday until the day before—he began to doze off again despite similar shouts that followed and finally fell back asleep as he heard a door slam.

---

Brendon sat on the kitchen floor, eating a bowl of bland cereal with dried fruit. "Good morning, Kade!" he said cheerfully, turning to look at the teenager with wide eyes as he slowly walked in. "Your mom said to tell her if you didn't get up by fifteen minutes after she left."

Kade stared at him, blinking rapidly to focus his vision. He wanted to go back to sleep. "When did she leave?"

"At nine. Should I tell?"

Kade rolled his eyes at the digital clock on the top of their oven, flashing '11:23' in an obnoxious green. "No. If she asks, I got up right after she walked out the door."

"All right!" he beamed, standing up to put his bowl in the sink. Kade watched him with satisfaction. Brendon could say anything to his normally cautious mother and she'd believe it. The kid had a knack for looking cutely sincere, meaning he could do basically whatever he wanted without consequence if he had the mind to. And since Brendon seemed to idolize him for some obscure reason, the things he got away with were the things that Kade wanted.

"Why were you sitting on the floor?" he asked, a bit disinterestedly.

"My dad said not to spill anything on your mom's nice tablecloth," Brendon replied, picking up raisins he'd dropped while eating. "I didn't want to mess anything up."

"It was just cereal," Kade told him. "You didn't even have milk on it." Why was he still talking? He didn't really care. His mind drifted to the previous night while Brendon went to throw the raisins away…

"Dammit Mom, it's only eleven-thirty! I want to go out!"

"Don't talk like that! You have to baby-sit tomorrow, and your brothers are coming home! Go to sleep!"

"No!" he screamed, throwing on a jacket. "I'll be back by three."

His mother called after him bitterly as he stormed out the door, but he simply slammed it shut to drown her out. Kade stood on his own porch, shaking, and realized that she had stopped talking after the door had closed. He also realized, with a bit of a shock, that he could hear her retreating footsteps mingled with a strangled sob. That meant she was going to bed. That meant he had won the fight, and now he was free to stay out.

"I can do whatever I want," he breathed, his breath forming wisps of visible air in the crisp night.

---

The city was sparkling and glorious, and Kade wished he had been there before. Everything—the buildings, the roadways—had a sort of almost unnoticeable blue metallic sheen, which made him feel as though he'd been plunged years into the future.

Brendon had been staring at everything with impossible wide eyes since they'd arrived. "You mean we lived this close our whole lives? And we just never came here?" the boy breathed, voice soft as his head craned upward to see the top of a skyscraper they were passing.

The people walking near them were different too, somehow. Were they all holding their heads a little higher? Were they all doused in a sense of importance, like they all had somewhere to be or something to do?

Nobody stayed still except for the Authorities posted at every corner. But even they were different from the Authorities in his dingy town—they were smiling and making conversation with the passers-by, and nobody looked at them with any trace of fear, or even nervousness or irritation. They were there to watch and not to oppress, because nobody in this utopia needed to be oppressed and nobody wanted to break the law…

---

A young woman walked along in the narrow courtyard, pretty and prettily dressed. The series of close arched, glassless windows in the wall linked the tranquil place to the bustling castle. Next to her, though inside the castle and separated by the stone wall, a lean man of the same age kept her pace.

"You really are like a robin's egg, aren't you?" he asked with a devious smirk. "You're very beautiful…"

The woman paused and turned to face him with a small smile, though he could tell she was trying not to blush.

"…and very brainless," he finished, and laughed at her cry of indignation. "Nonetheless, I think your performances could be fantastic with some work."

---

The blue-skinned Elf Queen sat straight and proud, and made sure that nothing in her demeanor betrayed any kind of dissatisfaction with her surroundings. But she was dissatisfied.

I only visit my city of origin once a year, she had told her close companion earlier, and half the time I spend making public appearances at the Authority Center. And there's hardly need of an Authority Center in this region anyway. I made sure of that.

She was the leading Authority, however, and it would not do for her to not be seen here. As she had been reminded by said companion.

So far, she'd sat and smiled and surveyed and given the journalists a nice, easy story. Nothing of interest had happened at the Center since she'd arrived, simply simple legal procedures that had ended in handshakes and gladness.

So when the child had been brought in she initially thought nothing of it. Probably the little urchin was representing his school in a petition for funding.

The Oversight seemed more agitated than normal, however, when he listened to the Authority who had brought the boy in, and peered closely at him before the proceedings began.

"Now, son," the Oversight said in his rumbling voice as the child was set down in one of the interrogation tables, "I want you to tell the truth when I ask you questions. If you cooperate, this might not take too long. You're sister outside, you don't want to keep her waiting?"

The Elf Queen was out of her haze of boredom this time, and began to take a little interest in the Oversight's manner and the disturbing way the child gazed at everything through glazed eyes.

And when she saw the gray, oval-shaped trinket he was fiddling in his hands, she was completely immersed in the proceedings.

The Oversight began to speak again, and his piercing look firmly held the child's bland expression.

"Brendon, we need you to tell us where you saw your kidnapper last. Where is Kade?"