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without force, and the stone landed several feet in front of Cam, plopping into the dust. It was no bigger than a pebble.
    Immediately a soldier leaped onto the wall, grabbed the child by the neck, and thrust his short sword into the little belly.
    The child screamed, a high inhuman shriek like an animal caught in a trap. The soldier tossed the body, gushing blood as soon as the sword was withdrawn, from the wall. The child continued to scream, but the woman who darted from behind a wagon to snatch him to her made no noise. To Cam, staring in horror, that was the most terrible part: The mother didn’t dare yell or wail or cry. She huddled over her child in complete silence, both of them covered with blood, until through the inadequate shield of her arms Cam saw the little body stop twitching and the solitary scream stopped.
    Cam trembled. She tried to stop the movement in her legs and arms but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, it went on and on. Then Rem Aveo’s arm came around her shoulders, she was clamped to his side, and his hand gripped her wrist and held it steady.
    Everyone watched her.
    Rem Aveo spoke and the translator said in her ear, “Do not fall over.”
    “I’m okay,” she gasped. After a moment she pulled away from him. Her trembling stopped. The procession moved forward, through the dusty streets, and she, Rem Aveo, and the commander entered a large tent, where the trembling began again.
    Cam swore. She hated herself for this, it was stupid, she was supposed to be an impartial Witness no matter what happened, it was what she’d been sent here for . . . that child, no more than a toddler, really, spitted like a chicken and that poor mother too afraid to even cry out . . .
    Cam was sitting on a stool, holding a metal goblet. Rem Aveo had one, too—yes, that was right, the soldier had poured them both from a leather bag. Rem Aveo drank his.
    The commander stared at her frankly, speculation in his pale eyes.
    Rem Aveo said quietly in Pularit, “You come from a place where such killing does not happen.”
    “Yes,” Cam choked out, even as part of her mind thought,
No
. Such killing happened all the time on Earth, she read about it in the flimsies, saw it on the newscasts. Soldiers casually murdered children all the time in Africa, in Asia, in South America. But not in Nebraska, not on Cam’s small-town street, not in her sight.
    “Where,” Rem Aveo said skeptically, “can such a place be, if people live there?” And she stared at him over the rim of her goblet, not knowing how to answer. Wondering for the first time if she really could do this, or if the Atoners had not made a terrible mistake in choosing her, so shaken by a single death, to witness whatever incomprehensible thing it was that they needed to know.

 
     
7: AVEO
     
     
    “WHAT IS SHE?” Cul Escio said in a low voice to Aveo.
    Aveo said, “I don’t know.” It was the truth, although he saw that Escio didn’t believe him. Also that Escio didn’t not believe him. But the man was a soldier, a commander; he liked certainty. A scholar’s ambiguity was distasteful to him. And yet—Escio had read Aveo’s treatise on reality and kulith.
    “Tell me,
rem
, what you think she is.”
    The two men stood at the doorway of Escio’s tent. The woman from the sky sat on a stool, holding a goblet of wine. The tent darkened with the sky, but no slave came to light the lamps. The camp lay as if deserted, deathly silent.
    Aveo said carefully, “She speaks Pularit and says she is Pulari.”
    “So you have said.” Again, belief and disbelief mingled. “The Pulari play kulith. They do not have such sky eggs. And the Pulari can be killed. She must be a Pulari goddess.”
    “It is possible. I will need to talk to her further.”
    “Do so. Did you see that,
rem
?”
    Aveo had been watching Escio, not the woman. “See what?”
    “She reached inside her tunic for a moment, drank some wine, then reached inside again. What could that