“But,” said Tisarwat into the silence, “generally she doesn’t seem to care much about her job. Half the time Raughd is hanging around distracting her, and the other half she’s moping. But Raughd has been downwell for the past four or five days, and if Fleet Captain Breq has anything to say about it, she’s not coming back up anytime soon. I think you’re going to see a difference in Piat. I think,” she continued, “that she’s been made to feel that she’s not capable. That her own judgment is unreliable. I think she could use your support, at work.”

Basnaaid tilted her head and frowned further, looked intently at Tisarwat as though she’d seen something completely, puzzlingly unexpected. “Lieutenant, how old are you?”

Sudden confusion, in Tisarwat. Guilt, self-loathing, a thrill of… something like triumph or gratification. “Horticulturist. I’m seventeen.” A lie that wasn’t exactly a lie.

“You didn’t seem seventeen just now,” said Basnaaid. “Did Fleet Captain Breq bring you along so you could find the weaknesses of the daughters of the station’s most prominent citizens?”

“No,” Tisarwat said, openly mournful. Inwardly despairing. “I think she brought me along because she thought I’d get into trouble if she wasn’t watching me.”

“If you’d told me that five minutes ago,” said Basnaaid, “I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Downwell, on the path through the woods by the lake, the sky had brightened to a more vivid blue. The brightness in the east had intensified, leaving the peak blocking the sun a jagged black silhouette. Sirix still walked beside me, silent. Patient. When she had not struck me as a patient person, except by the necessity of her situation, unable as she was to express anger without considerable discomfort, likely some of it physical. So, almost certainly a pose. “You’re as good as a concert, Fleet Captain,” she said, slightly mocking, confirming my suspicion. “Do the songs you’re always humming have anything to do with what you’re thinking about, or is it random?”

“It depends.” I had been humming the song the Kalr had been singing the day before, in Medical. “Sometimes it’s just a song I recently heard. It’s an old habit. I apologize for annoying you.”

“I didn’t say I was annoyed. Though I wouldn’t have thought cousins of the Lord of the Radch cared much if they were annoying.”

“I didn’t say I would stop,” I pointed out. “Do you think all that happened—transportees being sold off, I mean—and the Lord of the Radch didn’t become aware of it?”