That night would be impossible to forget. Why didn't people understand? Men are dangerous. Maia was only doing her job.

The call came in, a 109, and these days the guardia had the work force power to respond to package theft fast. Not like in the old days.

A surveillance link went back in time to show the man tailing a couple, two women, inside their building.

Certainly, in a building with dozens of units, a few tenants were men. He could have been a tenant, a neighbor, and they were being polite, holding the secure door for him, so he wouldn't have to wait for it to close, and unlock it again.

The man, the perp, let them get ahead on the stairwell, Maia watched through the link that followed him. When they were gone he doubled back down the stairs to the linked mail collection space.

Packages and mail could be linked right inside customers' apartments, for a fee, but most little units in a place like this wouldn't have a designated link coordinate reception area inside, and without one, a large package or a long one could land over a fish tank or smash down on a glass coffee table. For a fee, one could get a link right outside the door, or even right inside the door.

In this barrio, most tenants would pick up packages from the mail room. No extra fee.

Only this building, like so many in this barrio, didn't have a mail room so much as a side of the hall on the ground floor before the stairs, where packages piled up against the wall. A gold mine for a package thief who had made it past the fingerprint lock doors.

There had been something so creepy about watching the man through that surveillance link. Watching a strange man creep around, looking like he didn't belong there, while dozens of tenants were home, many asnooze in their beds. He crept with the body language of knowing he wasn't suppose to be there, of someone who didn't live in that place, of violation, a known violation, penetrating someone else's residence. At times Maia wanted to look away.

The perpetrator had a black market magic connection, and he pulled out his matte black gnomon wand. Contraband gnomons could not be made of the same material as the real thing; the knockoffs couldn't get the material transmitted directly from the stars. Only a gnomon stolen from a magician right after mortality would be the genuine article. As the man stood over the packages with his knockoff, one by one they disappeared off somewhere.

No portal needed. Packages straight up vanished. Maia made a note. Not only did he have illegal magic access, a true magician would have needed to teach him Constellation schemas for direct linking without a portal — faster, less work, and a huge breach of the law, for both parties.

That had been eleven minutes ago; the next tenants to come in noticed the mail pile was missing, and called the guardia on a link. Time travel magic could be used to watch a perp, but code prevented the use of a temporal link to go get him eleven minutes in the past. For a minor felony, they had to go get him in the present.

If they had taken the time, gone back in time to give themselves a little more of it, maybe the bloodshed could have been avoided.

But the schlucks up top considered it too costly for the budget.

"I was just doing my job," she would say again and again. "By the book."

Linking together straight to the address, Maia and her partner Ura looked up at the gray highrise, most light in the windows off, and Ura took a victim statement from the woman who had made the report. Ura would only be a link away, as Maia cast a foot traffic tracing spell tied to the time stamp at the moment of the theft, and slinked off after the suspect's footsteps.

His face had been hidden by a mask he must have discarded by now, but how many six foot masculine figures would be out here? She had seen his clothes. She could track his steps. He was not getting away, not on her watch. The black market abuse had to stop. Maia was going to be the one to do it. Get their source, dry up the supply, and with a stack of contraband gnomons on the table for the media to see, she would make Capo.

She passed by a grayscale, selling wares on the sidewalk in the low light of a closed shop.

The piles and piles of books spread on the blanket in front of her could all be from perfectly innocent garbage diving in a wealthy neighborhood nearby where people trashed perfectly good stuff, or it could be loot from stolen packages.

Books and magazines, Stellar tablets, evergreen houseplants, magical pantry staples and spices and probably vials of Story pills, and animated clothing hanging on the bars of a gate outside the store entrance. Either way, she couldn't be out here selling goods on the street, not that it stopped hundreds of grayscales all over the city every night, and it didn't stop the Soliari from stopping to buy stolen Stellars on the cheap.

Maia would have loved to stop and issue that woman a citation for unlicensed vending, but no time now.

When she came across the suspect, he was threatening, twice her height it felt like, and he had just as much magic up his sleeve as she did. He was coming toward her when Maia fired. That's what she wrote in her report. That's how she remembered it. He ran at her. Why would he run at her? He had a long-rage, all powerful weapon. She wrote it anyways. On the paperwork, and in her memory.

The autopsy agreed because her shot had entered his body from the front, and the fear she felt, as she documented, was the reason she had fired within ten seconds of first sighting the suspect, and that fear was why she must have been under threat. He ran at her. He was running toward her. It had to be that. It couldn't just be that she was afraid of men. That would be discrimination.

Didn't matter what excuse she made, they assigned empathy training. How dare they. She didn't discriminate against men. Men were killers and rapists. That's just how it was. And if a no good package thief came at you, what choice did you have but to fire?

Had his torso been about to twist away?

His hands had been up, she had a clip of that in her memory. Her training, her martial arts practice, taught her to anticipate body movements at the first hint. Putting his back to her. Twisting torso from the left, thoracic spine and left rib cage rotating, just a hint, but that was there in her memory too, a visual clip. He was about to. He hadn't yet.

Maia had already fired her starfire into him, and it happened so fast she hadn't conjured up the coordinates for a humane killing, to ignite a part of her brain that would make it painless, quick, contained. Instead, horribly, the bullet of starfire, hotter than molten hot, penetrated his neck like a spear, angled to pierce the throat and puncture the vertibrae of his upper cervical spine, right below the skull.

The man's dark shirt soaked in blood that almost could have been a sweat pool on a dark night if the red reflecting light brighter than she expected on his neck and arms hadn't said otherwise. He had gone down. No longer a threat. Neutralized. The man had been neutralized. That was the job.

Howling in her head What have I done, No. no, no, come back, what—

she silenced, no room for that, this is the job.

The Story she took for empathy training made her sick. She walked around in a man's body. They weren't him, the man she had killed, at least not so far, but always a man with a tall height, bulky, a heavy man, and she woke from the Story dream yelling her throat out and shaking, panting, soaked by the tears and sweat, soggy clothes drenched.

She had nightmares. What her brain felt almost contradicted what she knew. She told her mind, Stop this. Stop letting them make you think he was a good person. He wasn't. He wasn't decent. He was no angel. Shut up. Then she would roll over and vomit. How was this supposed to help? She asked Doctor Azikaze.

"If you confront your responsibility, perhaps it will feel better."

It didn't feel better. It wasn't her fault Pax Oniri had been a no good criminal,

he was no angel,

it wasn't her fault.

it wasn't.

Writers have messages. Writers believe. Writers hold opinions and infuse their writing with what they believe in. Constellations is fueled by some very strong beliefs about how we should treat each other and the truth behind how we do treat each other in reality. Now, when we're very good at our job, it comes across clearly what we believe and think, and what readers can be expected to take from the story, but to get good at it, we need feedback. We need workshopping. It takes a village to create a story.

So I'm asking sensitivity readers to please leave your thoughts on how this story is working. How does it make you feel? Is it too generous to Maia, too harsh, does it portray reality right, is the message muddled? Thank you, as always, for your honest thoughts. I hope we can keep the lines of communication open and always have conversations, even about challenging topics.

This story is an allegory for officer involved shootings of African American men, and people of color in general. I felt the world I built created an opportunity for this allegory, because in Chiara's Star, we see that men have become a minority in the population. This creates a rare immersion into a world where a white male could see himself as a potential victim of oppression, which is not how power systems in the real world work; I hope in this story there's a chance for white males to imagine what it's like to be seen as a threat, which in turns makes the authorities a threat to their own bodily safety, and that of those we love. 

I need insight from people of color and sensitivity readers on whether anything in this story rings true, and if the allegory feels fair. I appreciate all of your thoughts. The end of this story will be ready next Friday. Thanks!