“So you were already with the boy you saved when the fire started?” Patrick pauses, but shakes his head. “No, there was an explosion—I don’t really know what it was, but then it was just me and Tigre, and it’s like, in a situation like that, you don’t really think? You just do. So I grabbed the kid and went through the fire escape. It’s not like I decided I wanted to save anybody, it was just the only option.”

Esdras Al-Ridha is born in 1899, in his mother’s family home. His birth certificate, when it’s written a month later by Dr. Yuriy Rockbell, will declare his name Edward Elric. It will name his mother Trisha, and it will say nothing of her white hair. It will say nothing of the blue desert sky he first opens his eyes under, the way he is passed to relative after relative and is held and blessed by each. (Even before the war, tensions are high, and hatred is brewing. Tirzah holds her newborn son, with eyes as gold as his father’s, and pale-sun hair halfway there, and she decides that if Ishvala wants him hidden, then Tirzah will not brand him where his genes have not.)