The first thing that came to him every morning, before light, before sound, before any thought had the decency to form itself, was the smell.

  Dung. Warm and immediate, the way only something living can be. Iruga lay on his cot in the corner of the barn and breathed it in the way a man breathes when he has no other choice, which was the only way he had ever breathed it. Twenty-some years of mornings and it still hit him the same. He stared at the ceiling and waited for his stomach to decide what it was going to do.

  "Still," he said to no one, "after all this time."

  He sat up slowly, pressed the back of his wrist against his nose, and swallowed. The nausea passed, as it always did, just enough to let him stand.

  His father Kamiki Sagun had given him the barn room when Iruga was old enough to be useful, which in Smardoh meant old enough to hold a shovel. The arrangement was practical. The cattle needed watching in the night, and Iruga was there. The dung needed collecting come morning, and Iruga was there for that too. The waste would be packed into sacks, left to sit, and turned into fertilizer that kept the village's farming supply running. Kamiki had explained this to him once with the quiet authority of a village leader laying out something obvious. Iruga had not argued. There was no argument to make.

  Before heading out he crossed from the barn to the house, where the morning was still grey and the table already had bread and a cup of grape juice set out. He tore off a piece of the bread — dry, as it always was — and chewed it standing up, washing it down with the juice in two long swallows.

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  His mother Ana was at the far end of the room. He went to her and kissed her on the forehead before she could say anything, which did not stop her from saying it anyway.

  "Iruga. You need to bathe."

  "I'll smell the same in an hour," he said, already moving toward the door.

  "Iruga."

  "Same smell, fresher man." He pulled the door open. "Good morning, mother."

  He heard her exhale behind him as he stepped outside.

  The shovel was where he left it. The cattle moved around him with the slow indifference of animals that had long since decided he was part of the barn and not worth noting. He worked the way he always worked — methodical, unhurried, because hurrying did not make the job smaller, only louder. He scooped and dropped, scooped and dropped, and the sack filled the way it always filled, and the morning moved the way it always moved.

  He was on his third sack when he saw it.

  Something caught the light in a way that dung does not catch light. He stopped. Looked closer. Buried just beneath the surface, half-swallowed by the muck, was something small and glinting — a shard of glass, or something shaped like one, catching the pale morning in a way that made it look almost valuable.

  Iruga crouched down. He reached for it without thinking, the way a man reaches for something shining before his better sense arrives, and the edge of it found his finger before he found it. A short, clean nick. He pulled his hand back and looked at the blood welling up at the tip of his finger, thin and bright.

  Then the earth slammed into him, and the world went dark.