As his father had said once, “They didn’t want it to go to waste. And they feared that the young officers might be too ambitious left at home. And there was this kind of claustrophobic restlessness hard to understand now, perhaps. People wanted to be part of Ambergris, but to be out of it at the same time. They felt cramped, hemmed in—and the eastern flank of the Kalif’s empire was so close, and the Kalif spread so thin, defending all of that territory. It was too tempting. Too easy.”

One of his father’s first tasks was to get the Hoegbotton army across the Moth in a way that allowed quick return. He accomplished this with boats, with floating bridges that could be taken apart and reused in other ways. From there, “the Fixer,” as he came to be called, participated in more than a dozen battles. Helping take defensive positions. Solving how to get across supposedly impassable mountains. Whenever they needed an engineer, he was there. And he had the photographs to prove it, the ones Finch had since consigned to the flames: his lean, clean-shaven figure posing in front of a canyon, a cityscape, a smoldering tank. If the posture seemed more stooped, more resigned, the smile a little more faded as time passed, it could have been the natural process of aging. If not for Finch knowing that, eventually, what his father had found there would kill him.

He’d told Finch one day that he’d imagined he would be able to quit the military, take on the civilian projects that he preferred. Saw, he said, a grand new age of architectural expansion, as in the days of Pejoran. A city reimagined and rebuilt in a way that meant more than just restoration or renovation. Mineral deposits that fueled a war effort could fuel a peace effort.

But it didn’t happen that way, as if the dust of empire that slowly changed his father had changed Ambergris, too. House Hoegbotton’s race to acquire territory in the name of Ambergris meant not engaging insurgents at its exposed flanks: holding cities but not holding land. Until, finally, a slow collapse back to the River Moth, leaving behind as evidence of their passage more than a few half-breed children, abandoned equipment, and all of Finch’s father’s engineering projects. His father had had photos of these, too. In a separate album. He used to thumb through it at night with Finch on his lap, as if to deny what had happened next.

Images from some other life. A few of a woman with the distinctive features of the west. Faded. Worn. Lost.

His father had returned to an Ambergris exhausted in some ways, with House Frankwrithe eager to resurrect itself in people’s hearts because House Hoegbotton neglected the home front to focus on the Kalif. Food shortages, electricity shortages.