Whoever wants to go to Joy needs Joy

At the border post an inspector sits with a lens, comparing the knots in your pattern band with your face. If the two agree, he lifts the bar. If they do not, you walk two days back.

Jaron, fifteen, can produce any feeling that is required of him. Nuria cannot — at any rate not when somebody is looking. When her band is declared unreadable for good, she has eleven days before it is decided ex officio whether she exists.

They go. On a borrowed cart they pull an old lightweaver across the land between the realms, a man who wants to check something first and will not say what. On the way they are joined by a warden at whose exit post nobody has come by in nine years.

What stands at the end of the road is provided for in no instruction. Nor is there anybody left to ask.