I cut her off. “I’m coming.” The child took off running, and I headed down the shadowed corridor after her. Someone painted on the wall again. Minor enough. Small enough to ignore, one might think, but Captain Hetnys had overreacted before—how badly clear to read in this child’s urgency, either her own conclusions about what might happen when Sword of Atagaris Var arrived, or conveyed to her by some adult who’d sent her as messenger. Serious enough. And if it turned out to be nothing, well, I would only have delayed my breakfast by a few minutes.

“What did they paint?” I asked, climbing up a ladder in an access well, the only way between levels here.

“Some kind of words,” the child replied, above me. “It’s words!”

So she either hadn’t seen them or couldn’t read them, and I guessed it was the second. Probably not Radchaai then, or Raswar, which I’d learned over the past two days was read and spoken by most of the Ychana here. Station had told me, my first night here, when I’d asked it for some information, some history, that most of the residents in the Undergarden were Ychana.

It was Xhi, though rendered phonetically in Radchaai script. Whoever had done it had used the same pink paint that had been used to decorate the tea shop door, that had been left sitting at the side of the small, makeshift concourse. I recognized the words, not because I knew more than a few phrases of Xhi at this point but because it dated from the annexation, had been emblematic of a particular resistance movement Station had told me about, two nights before. Not tea but blood! It was a play on words. The Radchaai word for “tea” bore a passing resemblance to the Xhi word for “blood,” and the implication was that the revolutionaries, rather than submitting to the Radch and drinking tea, would resist and drink (or at least spill) Radchaai blood. Those revolutionaries were several hundred years dead, that clever slogan no more than trivia in a history lesson.

The child, having seen me stop in front of the paint, not far from the tea shop entrance, took off running again, eager to be safely away. The rest of the Undergarden’s residents had done the same—the small concourse was deserted, though I knew that at this hour there should be if nothing else a steady stream of customers into the tea shop. Anyone passing this way had taken one look at that Not tea but blood! and turned right around to find somewhere safe and out of the way of Sword of Atagaris’s Var lieutenant and her ancillaries. I was alone, Kalr Five still climbing up the access well, having been a good deal slower than I was.