“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see . . . all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read . . . in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.

“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled . . . or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was . . . judged. It was severe . . . the last sanction but one . . . There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so . . . And there are others that are judged equal . . . many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.

“The actions vary: the crime . . . is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws . . . that sexualize and sacralize . . . for whom individuals are defined abstract . . . their matrix-nature ignored . . . where context is a distraction . . . cannot grasp that.

“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims . . . And when Yagharek returns . . . I ask you to observe our justice—Yagharek’s justice—not to impute your own.

“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”

Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?

Kar’uchai watched him struggle.

Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.

She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.

“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.

Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Please . . .”

He turned back to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.

After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.

He started as if he had forgotten she was there.

“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.

And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace—marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty—thinking about Yagharek.

Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?

He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?