I’m talking to Ronald Wayne Devers as he finishes painting our pier before the king’s ship picks him up tomorrow. Painting the pier is the sentence I gave him when he admitted stealing Plucky’s cat. He says he feels better than he has in a long time because he’s doing something useful. He thinks he might start a painting business when he goes back home. He knows he doesn’t want anything more to do with the Beacons of Night. “You wanna know what I think?” he says. “When a Beacon leader tells people that being born on another planet makes someone bad, it makes those people feel important because they were born on Earth. And when you make people feel important, they’ll do things for you.” Deadpan said he examined the paint job until he was blue in the face.