Aaron was twelve years old now, and as he was walking along the balcony of the estate he heard him before he saw him.
Laughter did not belong in the inner courtyards. Not the unfiltered kind. The Diamond Palace permitted many sounds — footsteps, murmured exchanges, the quiet orchestration of a thousand routines running in parallel — but joy here moved carefully, shaped by etiquette and softened by the awareness of being observed.
This was different.
This was noise. The kind that bounced off marble without apology and rolled down corridors without asking permission.
Aaron paused beneath the arch of the eastern gallery, fingers resting against cool stone, and waited.
The laughter came again. Closer. And then a blur of motion broke into the courtyard like something that had been kept too long in a smaller space and had finally found room.
The boy skidded to a halt in the middle of the open stone, boots scraping, one hand shooting out to catch the fountain's edge and arrest his momentum. His hair was summer-wheat colored, cut short but unevenly, as though someone had attempted order halfway through and abandoned it. His clothes were well-made and carelessly worn — collar skewed, one sleeve slightly pushed up, the overall impression of a person who dressed correctly in the morning and promptly forgot about it.
He was grinning.
Not the controlled expression Aaron had learned to read as social currency. A real one. The kind that reorganized the entire face rather than decorating the surface of it.
"Wait, wait — no, I almost had it!"
He spoke at full volume. Without checking who might hear. Without any apparent awareness that full volume was unusual in this particular geography.
Behind him, a servant — older, composed, with the particular tiredness of someone who had spent years being professionally patient — caught up at a dignified walk that was really a suppressed run.
"My young lord, the courtyard is not a racing course."
"I wasn't racing," the boy said, turning to address this with the seriousness of a legitimate philosophical point. "Racing requires competition. I was just moving faster than walking."
"That is the definition of running."
"Enthusiastic walking," he corrected, and held the correction without apology. "There's a difference."
The servant — whose name Aaron would later learn was Croft, and who had been managing Tomo's family's household since before Tomo could walk — drew a breath that managed to be both patient and slightly desperate. "My lord, if you could simply—"
Tomo tripped.
Just enough. His toe found an invisible imperfection in the stone and pitched him forward into a stumble. He caught himself against the fountain again, this time with both hands, and the recovery was graceless and immediate and completely unashamed.
He laughed. At himself. Openly, without calculation, as though his own clumsiness had genuinely entertained him.
The birds along the garden wall redistributed.
Aaron had not moved from the arch.
His first assessment was automatic: inefficiency in all directions. Unnecessary noise, unmeasured movement, energy spent without regard for outcome or observation. Every variable about this person ran contrary to the operational logic of the space he had just entered.
His second assessment arrived more slowly and surprised him.
The courtyard had changed.
Not structurally — the marble was the same, the fountains continued their patient arcs, the servants maintained their routes. But something had loosened in the atmosphere that Aaron had no precise word for. A maid crossing the far colonnade slowed almost imperceptibly, lips pressing together in what was almost a smile before professionalism claimed her back. The gardener trimming hedges near the south wall lifted his head for a moment before returning to his work.
The palace had not stopped functioning. It had simply exhaled.
Aaron noted this and filed it under a category he didn't yet have a lAaron for.
Tomo turned.
Children's social radar operated differently from adults' — it registered presence and emotional temperature rather than hierarchy and status. He spotted Aaron across the courtyard without searching for him and the grin that was already at its maximum extended somehow further.
"Hey!"
The word arrived across the open space like a thrown object. No title attached. No recalibration for bloodlines or expectations. Just direct, unarmored recognition.
Aaron did not respond immediately. He was recalibrating his own frameworks, which were not built for this particular input.
Tomo crossed the courtyard at a pace that was technically a walk and moved closer, stopping a few feet away with the casual proximity of someone who had never been trained to treat distance as a form of respect.
"I haven't seen you before," he said. Examining Aaron with open curiosity — not scrutiny, which would have had edges. Just interest. "Are you new? Or am I new?" A brief pause in which he appeared to genuinely consider this. "I think I'm new."
"I live here," Aaron said.
Even as he said it he heard how it landed — precise, stripped of the looseness children usually wore in speech. Tomo did not seem to notice or mind.
"Then I'm definitely new." He extended a hand without any apparent consideration of whether this was the correct gesture. "I'm Tomo. Tomo Veld. My father is meeting with yours about something. No one explained what." He said this without resentment, just factual reporting of available data.
Aaron looked at the hand.
He was aware of Croft standing at the courtyard's edge with the expression of someone who had decided to let a situation proceed because intervening would require more energy than observing.
Children of noble houses did not extend hands like this. Contact was layered — it established equality where systems preferred gradients, it moved through protocols that both parties understood. This hand had no protocol attached to it. It was simply there.
He lifted his own hand and they shook.
Tomo's grip was firm and unrehearsed, no measured pressure, no symbolic restraint.
"See?" Tomo said, as if confirming a result. "Now we know each other. What's your name?"
"Aaron."
"Aaron." He tried it. "That's a serious name."
"It's just a name."
"Names are usually something." He tilted his head. "Mine means nothing good in three languages. My tutor told me. I think he meant it as a warning."
Aaron looked at him. "Was it effective?"
Tomo grinned. "Not even slightly."
They walked after that — or Tomo moved and Aaron accompanied him, which amounted to the same thing but felt structurally different. Tomo treated the courtyard as a space to be investigated rather than crossed, stopping at the fountain to test the temperature of the water with one finger, detouring toward a cluster of potted plants near the south wall to identify what they were, falling into a brief conversation with the gardener that the gardener clearly had not been prepared for.
Aaron watched that exchange.
"What's this one?" Tomo asked, pointing at a low, dark-leaved shrub.
The gardener — a man in his fifties who, in Aaron's considerable observation of palace routines, had never once been directly addressed by a noble child — looked up with the particular expression of someone recalculating rapidly. "Ah — that's silverleaf, my lord. Drought-hardy. They plant it along the south edges because it holds moisture in the soil for the other plants."
"So it sacrifices water for its neighbors."
The gardener blinked. "In a manner of speaking, my lord."
"That's either very selfless or very stupid, depending on whether the neighbors deserve it." He looked at the plant with what appeared to be genuine consideration. "I hope they deserve it."
He moved on before the gardener could formulate a response. The gardener watched him go with an expression Aaron could not categorize.
"You speak to everyone," Aaron said.
"Should I not?"
"Most people in this house don't."
Tomo glanced at him sideways, still walking. "Does that seem right to you?"
Aaron considered. "It seems normal."
"Normal isn't the same as right." Said easily, without lecturing, the way someone stated a thing they had simply already resolved. "My father says I talk too much to staff. He means I should talk less. I think he means I should talk more carefully." He paused. "I'm working on the carefully part."
"But not the less part."
"The less part seems like the wrong solution to the problem."
They stopped again at the fountain. Tomo sat on the edge of it without appearing to notice this was something people didn't do, at least not in their clothes, at least not in courtyards visible from the upper gallery windows. He dragged one hand through the water absently.
"This place feels like everyone's holding their breath," he said. Quieter now. Not a complaint — more like an observation he was saying aloud to examine it. "Like the whole building is waiting for something to go wrong."
Aaron stood beside the fountain and said nothing.
He had thought the same thing. Not in those words, but in that shape. The palace's operational precision had always carried a quality he had characterized as efficiency. He wondered now if he had been mislAaroning it.
"Does it bother you?" he asked.
Tomo looked up at him. It was a direct look — the kind that didn't angle itself carefully before making contact. "A bit. Not because it's bad. Just because it doesn't have to be that way." He shrugged one shoulder. "People relax around other relaxed people. It sort of... spreads."
"Like a system."
Tomo blinked. "I was going to say like a mood. But sure, like a system." He seemed to find this interesting rather than strange. "Do you think about things like systems a lot?"
"Yes."
"Hm." He considered Aaron with the same open attention he had given the silverleaf plant. "What am I, in terms of a system?"
Aaron did not answer immediately. He ran it.
Tomo Veld was, by every operational metric, an inefficient variable — noise introduced into a precision environment, movement that disregarded established routes, social interactions that crossed the lines maintaining the palace's hierarchical climate. He created deviation wherever he went. Deviation was, as a rule, a problem to be minimized.
But the courtyard had exhaled.
The maid had almost smiled. The gardener had been briefly, genuinely engaged rather than performing engagement. Even Croft, standing at the colonnade with his studied patience, had something across his face that was not quite disapproval.
The deviation was producing a secondary effect that his models didn't fully account for.
"Unpredictable," Aaron said.
Tomo laughed. "Fair." He didn't seem disappointed by this. "My tutor says I'm a disruption. He means it badly. I've decided to take it well."
"What does your father say?"
The question shifted something in Tomo's expression — not much, and not in a way that closed him off, but the openness gained a thin layer of something more considered. "He says I'll learn when to hold it in." A pause. "He's probably right. He usually is about things like that." Another pause, and then more quietly: "I just don't think holding it in should be the whole answer."
Aaron looked at the water. Sunlight fractured across its surface in shifting geometry, constant movement producing what looked, from a distance, like pattern.
He had spent five years in this life building a theory of power that was essentially the same theory he'd held in his previous one, updated for new context. Control was stability. Structure was safety. Precision was the armor that kept systems from collapsing into chaos. He had mapped the palace as a machine because that was what he understood how to do, and machines were legible, and legibility was the foundation of leverage.
He had not modeled for warmth as a structural element.
He had not considered that the palace's climate — the particular quality of its held breath, the tension that lived in Haddon's four-step pause before every doorway, in the servants who answered questions in complete, careful sentences without making eye contact — might itself be a variable. One that could shift. One that had costs he hadn't accounted for.
Tomo leaned back on his palms at the fountain's edge, tilting his face up toward the afternoon light.
"What do you actually like?" he asked. Not segued to — just arrived at, the way his mind seemed to move. "Not what you're good at. What do you like."
Aaron opened his mouth and paused.
The question had a specific texture he wasn't used to encountering. Most people who engaged with him — tutors, servants, his parents, the occasional visiting noble child who had been brought along to diplomatic events — asked what he was studying, or how he was finding his lessons, or whether he preferred certain subjects. Questions with quantifiable answers. Questions built for the architecture of polite exchange.
This question had no protocol.
"I don't know," he said. And then, because that was both true and insufficient: "I like understanding things."
"Sure. But that's how, not what." Tomo looked at him sideways, squinting slightly against the light. "What's the thing, when you understand it, that feels most worth understanding?"
Aaron thought about the gardener and the silverleaf. About Haddon and the kitchen runner. About the dinner table six nights ago and his father saying the cost is always decided before you know what it is.
"Why people build the systems they build," he said. "And why they stay inside ones that hurt them."
Tomo was quiet for a moment.
"That's a heavy thing for someone your age," he said.
"What do you like?" Aaron asked. Returning it. He was curious — genuinely, in a way that surprised him slightly — what the answer would be.
Tomo's expression shifted back into the open register it usually occupied. "People," he said simply. "I like people. Even the ones who are difficult. Especially those, actually — they're usually more interesting once they stop trying to be less difficult."
He glanced at Aaron.
"You're going to be one of those," he said. Not unkindly.
"Difficult."
"Interesting." A beat. "Probably both."
Croft appeared at the colonnade entrance with a stance that communicated, without speaking, that the afternoon's latitude had reached its limit.
"My young lord, your father's meeting concludes within the hour."
Tomo looked at him, then at Aaron, then back at Croft with the expression of someone accepting a reality they're too pragmatic to argue with today. "One minute," he said.
Croft did not move, which was its own answer.
Tomo stood and dusted his hands on his trousers — a gesture that accomplished nothing practically but seemed habitual. He faced Aaron with the same directness he had brought to every other moment of the last hour.
"I'll probably be here for a few more days," he said. "If you want to walk again." He said it as an offer rather than an assumption, which was a distinction Aaron noted. "You can say no. I won't be offended."
Aaron looked at him.
He thought about the courtyard exhaling. The maid almost smiling. The gardener briefly becoming a person who cared about whether the silverleaf's neighbors deserved it. Small shifts. Unmeasured. Impossible to assign a value to by the metrics he usually used.
New data required new categories.
"Tomorrow morning," Aaron said.
Tomo's face did what it always did.
The grin. The real one.
"Good," he said. And then, turning toward Croft with the easy momentum that seemed to be his default mode: "See, Croft? Efficient. Done in one."
Croft guided him toward the exit with the dignity of a man who had been doing this for years and had made his peace with it.
Aaron remained at the fountain.
He watched the water.
He had entered this courtyard this afternoon with a complete and internally consistent model of how power worked — built in one life, refined in another, tested against everything this palace had offered him so far. It was a good model. It had explanatory power. It accounted for most variables.
He was beginning to understand that it did not account for all of them.
Stability built on fear held its shape until the fear became insufficient. He had seen that. He had lived inside that equation and been removed from it.
But a room where people breathed — where servants looked up, where gardeners became briefly themselves, where a maid almost smiled while carrying linens through a corridor — that held differently.
Not weaker. Different.
He filed it. Not as a conclusion. As an open question.
The water moved. The light moved across it. The courtyard settled back into its usual rhythms, quieter without Tomo in it, the particular quality of its atmosphere returning to the calibration it maintained by default.
But something remained.
Not a disruption.
A revision.
He pushed off from the fountain and walked back toward the gallery arch.
Tomorrow morning, he had said.
He found, examining the decision, that he meant it.