The morning sun didn’t rise. It split the sky.
The pale lemon sun of the Grand Duchy and the blinding brass solar mirror of the Sun-Crown Hegemony rose on opposite sides of the eastern horizon. He cast long, razor-sharp shadows that crossed at forty-five-degree angles through the narrow alleys of the Merchant Quarter.
The morning in Low-Khorat had begun with the eerie, surreal absurdity that now defined the city.
At dawn, Ren had stood on the balcony of the Old Customs Exchange. He watched ordinary shopkeepers try to navigate the impossibility of their lives. A baker on Market Street had set up his bread stall directly across a boundary line where cobblestones fused into white mosaic tiles. On the left side of his cart, a loaf of dark rye bread was cooling in the brisk autumn chill. On the right side of his cart, two inches away, the exact same loaf was sizzling under the scorching, midsummer brass glare of the second sun. Its crust turned black and blistered before his eyes.
Children on their way to the factory shifts played a new game. Throwing copper pennies across the street to watch them age forty years in mid-air, catching the green-rusted through coins on the other side with triumphant laughter.
