Diliculum — The Half Hour Before Dawn

It was like clockwork. Every morning, before so much as a hint of sunrise in Soliara City, capital of the Solari Empire, the city scurried in the dark.

Men and women in business attire surged through the streets. Street lamps cast light on faces and the shadows of pedestrians against brick and cement exteriors. Portia Nero and millions of workers got an early start to the day while it was so dark it hardly differed from downtown at midnight. Always the same.

Only today, Portia had to be late, because when she topped the stairs out of the rapid transit tunnel outside Constellation, Sol had risen already.

Dawn light made a dent on the morning shade, brightening the cement beneath her black heels. It might even be well after dawn — hard to tell from the street level below so many levitating towers.

How had she had managed to lose an hour of her life?

"Incredible," she muttered, looking down at her watch. An hour behind; mystery solved. Shaking her head, she turned the crown on her watch until the time read hora prima, and entered the lobby to wait for the elevator.

Start early and stay late, the only way to get ahead, but who wants to be herded into an elevator with these sleepy morons staggering in every morning like sleepwalkers in brogues instead of slippers? First thing, barely awake and nothing in your belly but a pot of coffee and a bite of toast on the run — and late anyways this morning. You can tell they're slackers and dullards because if they had magic licenses or got promoted ever, they would link commute.

Portia, on the other hand, chose not to get a magical education, and it hadn't stopped her from climbing all the way to a top executive position at the company. These idiots would link if they could. Don't know how they hold on to their Constellation jobs, after traveling vertically with them every diliculum and vespera.

The elevator lifted. Same as every morning, one chipper maniac had to say good morning to everyone, and expected the semiconscious beings to say good morning back. And same as every morning, the elevator operator whistling. Portia ground her teeth together, the only way to keep her mouth closed when she felt the compulsion to tell the vertical lift magician that if he didn't stop whistling he was going to stop breathing, because Portia was going to strangle him. She pondered how to keep her hands busy and she ground down her enamel.

The elevator doors opened a dozen times to let people out. In the mirrors now visible without so many crammed in bottom feeding sardines, Portia could see her reflection; she straightened her shirt collar. The woman next to her lifted a wrist to check her watch and scowled at it. At the top floor the elevator opened onto the twilit roof and the last passengers walked out into the morning sky.

Ahead, a skyscraper floated a thousand feet above the ground, beginning where this one ended. Three more buildings orbited the rooftop behind Portia. In her building, the Eosphorus, light was on in all the windows. If Portia craned her neck, she could see her corner office from here, on the penultimate floor, way up above. Every day she took the elevator up to the sideways conveyor that floated above the city to the floating building she worked in to avoid crossing through a magic link on the regular. Or ever.

The Constellation towers hovered so that the best Constellation employees could have extra spacious offices — on the same real estate plot, keeping costs down — with the best views of the city. Portia wished it had occurred to her to be an inferior employee before they promoted her. But now that she had an office in the monstrously inconvenient floating tower of upper management, the only way onwards was up, literally. If she was going to work every day from solis ortum to hora decima in a building that could theoretically plummet to the ground at any moment, it might as well be on the top floor.

A precarious levitating conveyor platform approached the rooftop. Only a guardrail between passengers and death by falling. An indicator turned green. Portia stepped onto the vertical lift ahead of two other women. A few employees waited for lifts to the other towers: Alcyone, Merope and Pleione. The lift pushes off at the same time the indicator returns to red. Portia had requested a time delay — to prevent passengers from stepping out at the same time the lift started to move and plunging to their death — but that safety request had gone ignored. 

Miraculously, no one has ever fallen. She'd checked.

The lift moved across the sky, over the heads of pedestrians marching in the streets to their jobs, past inferior, shorter towers, and collided into Eosphorus's landing.

The horizontal floating death trap operator magician greeted passengers and wished them a good morning. Every morning. Portia carefully tended her relationship with the horizontal lift operator magician. She could be as impolite to the elevator operator as she wanted — the whistling idiot wasn't going to drop the elevator a thousand feet while he was inside it too, unless Portia did strangle him one day.

Anger the conveyor magician and she might let you free fall.

"Good morning, Mirai," Portia said and waved. It was best if she spoke first; she got grumpy the second Mirai opened her mouth.

Today Mirai didn't manage exactly. Her mouth flopped open but no sound came out. "Is everything all right?" Portia asked.

Mirai frowned and held her tongue, as if she didn't want to say anything stupid. It was another elevator ride up to the penultimate floor, and the elevator doors opening saved Mirai from answering; she waved mutely as Portia got in.

Portia got out on the twenty-ninth floor. Halfway to her office, her assistant Fable met her with a second pot of coffee. "You missed a call," she said.

"Thank you, Fable. You can connect me in a minute." When Portia reached the end of the hall, the doors to her office decided to slide open for her like the elevator doors only rosewood. She made it several steps inside.

"Did you see the sun?" said Fable.

"Yes," said Portia without turning around. "I'm late, I know." Most mornings it would have been completely dark with the light off, but it wasn't. The bookshelves on the right wall, the azure carpet, and armchairs for her visitors, her desk, everything lit by the early rays that came in through a span of corner window. Fable came in carrying folders for her and said, "You're not late, it's early."

"What's early?"

"The sunrise." Fable flicked her finger in the air to magic the light on. She walked to Portia's desk, put the files down, and said, "Do you want me to connect your call now?"

"Just what time is it?" said Portia, double checking the time to which she had adjusted her watch.

Fable looked at her own watch. "Fifteen minutes to."

"Fifteen minutes to? To what?"

"To sunrise."

"But the sun is up!" Portia went to stand at the window. The sun was up, warming the unparalleled view of the city, the tall buildings of the financial district, smaller residential high-rises with shops at street level beyond, and a sprawl of houses and campuses and parks and malls past that as every edifice became shorter and shorter before the beach and the sea to the east, over which the sun was up.

"Curious, right?" said a male voice behind her.

Portia frowned while her back was turned but she prepared a smile before she turned around. "Matiz! Was this prank your idea?" she said to the man on the other side of the link suspended over her desk, a square portal Fable had connected to Matiz Castra's office.

Matiz's office was even sunnier than Portia's. He was calling from Casicaa, the coastal city south-east of the capital and two hours ahead. He laughed. "It's not a prank. The sun rose over Casicaa three hours ago."

"Yes, because it's almost hora tertia there. And it's probably close to hora prima here, but my assistant won't tell me the exact time because she's messing with me."

Portia sat down at the desk and Fable asked, "Need anything?" Portia didn't tell her that Matiz's link was too close to her face and it would be less awkward if the link to his desk was a foot back on her desk; she shook her head and Fable left.

The doors closed behind her with a mind of their own.

Portia continued, "Cute of you to go along on her joke. I didn't realize what good friends you two have become while she was connecting our calls."

"No, no, it's true. I was just telling Fable, every clock in Casicaa says it's fifteen minutes to hora secunda, but the sun disagrees. The sun rose almost three hours ago. In Soliara the clocks say it's over an hora to prima, but the sun came up an hour early. That's not why I called, though. But I'm surprised you're skeptical, aren't you the one who's always saying something like this is going to happen?"

"Something like the sun rising early?" she said.

"You know. If we keep toying with magic. Bending the rules of physics." In a deep, dramatic voice he carried on, "Playing with forces we don't understand. The other day you said by Friday, President Gaia Solin was going to have knocked the planet off its axis. Well, it's only Thursday, but she's managed something like that already. Good foresight."

Portia shook her head, unable to decide if she should believe him. "Riiiight," she murmured and tapped a pen against her desk. Three taps and it rebounded too hard out of her fingers and flew over her shoulder, clattering onto the floor behind her.

Ignoring it, Portia leaned away from him in her desk chair to attain bonus personal space. "Why did you call? Any progress to report?" Matiz's face was too close to her face for the level of intimacy in their professional relationship, and she avoided eye contact as a result. The link on his desk created the illusion that they were seated at a table across from one another. A table where inky red rosewood ended in an abrupt line and turned into white oak.

Done toying with her about the time, Matiz's expression became serious and he avoided her question, asking, "Did you know about the director of Invernali?"

Portia looked away and said, "I don't see how that's any of my business," pointedly. Matiz knew Portia didn't want to know anything about that.

"It's just that the boss survived, the assassination failed. Did you know about Exequi Benito Fortunato?"

Portia sat up straighter in her desk chair. Someone attempted the assassination of Exequi Potestas? And it failed? And what about Exequi Fortunato? She did want to know about that. "No, I didn't, but I'm sure, even though I don't want to know," she lied, "you're about to tell me."

"If you don't want to know, why don't you close the link on me? Oh wait, you can't." His eyes narrowed and he went on, "Someone did succeed in assassinating the director in Casicaa. He was found dead when the sun came up. Which is to say three hours ago. Any idea why my boss was murdered?"

"This is the first I'm hearing of it. You probably know better than I do."

"But you're the one who recruited me for this 'movement.' What do you call it, Operation Star Dial Exclusivity? The Merit Based Division Act?"

"I don't call it anything—"

"It's your fault I'm now connected to an assassination attempt on Ilan Potestas, a strong ally of the president — and a plot you didn't even want to know about. But I'm sure you've been delegated a few plots of your own."

"You're not connected, and there's nothing to implicate us — we had nothing to do with—"

"Save it for the deposition and be straight with me. You said, and I quote, the lines would need to be crossed to make this movement reality. I accept that, and I don't care about Potestas. Line crossed. If you can introduce brackets of magic access and the amendment to immortality as we discussed, it'll be worth it. What I want to know is how Fortunato ended up in the crossfire. Why did my boss turn up dead on the day of the execution of your power grab? Exequi Fortunato was a good man and a good director."

"I'm sure his son Novus will do fine in his place," said Portia. "I didn't know anything about this. What exactly are you asking? Fortunato was on our side, wasn't he? That's why you're so worked up that he's dead."

"That, and he was a decent human being," said Matiz.

This wasn't working. She really needed to get off this call. She did, in fact, have "plots" delegated to her, not to mention a meeting to get to. She needed Matiz to hang up. That or she would have to call Fable in to disconnect the link for her, but she hated relying on her for all things magical, possibly more than she would hate to continue this conversation.

"Listen," she tried, "I'm very sorry about the death of—"

"The murder," said Matiz.

"I'll amend — the murder of Benito Fortunato." She didn't mean to laugh, but it just came out — "How many Fortunatos come to such unfortunate endings? Sorry, I know I shouldn't laugh about it — I do. I assure you that his murder was not a play by our side. Obviously. And if Solin's behind it, even better reason to unseat her. The murder investigation will determine who's responsible. I promise."

"Today," said Matiz.

"Really?"

"Before I pass on my information."

"Matiz, don't be like that. We need it today. I'm not sure I can solve a murder by the end of the day."

"Today, before I give you anything. You want the proprietary star dial key within—" he checked his watch — "eight hours. I want to know why my boss is dead, before I contribute any further to the 'movement.'"

"Well, in that case we better say goodbye, Matiz. Sounds like I have some calls to make, right?"

"That's right," said Matiz. "You have until hora sexta, and time seems to be ticking a little faster this morning."

His face meant it, and he disconnected the link, which snapped to nothing before Portia's eyes, without saying goodbye after all. And added to everything Portia had to do today was the burden of proof that the takeover was not in any way the cause of the death of Constellation Casicaa's director.

Thank you for reading Stars Rise. If you have been enjoying the story, please leave a star.