“Please don’t do that,” she says, quietly. “Not for me. Please.”

Quan lifts his head in surprise. The smile on his lips remains, but it’s changed somehow. His eyes regard her oddly, as if he’s seeing something in her he had not before.

He nods, but extends his arms and continues to offer her the tunic.

Dyeawan takes it, gratefully, bowing in return as best she can. She turns back toward the planners, instinctively cradling the tunic against her chest.

“We are thirteen now,” Edger informs the rest of them.

Again, Dyeawan sees that elation and excitement in the faces of the younger planner contingent, and what she can’t deny is resentment and even anger carved into the expressions of the older members. She doesn’t understand why. Neither does she understand the significance of the number thirteen among them.

“Welcome, Slider,” Edger bids her. “Please take your place at our table. There’s a space open beside me, if it suits you.”

More seemingly benign words, and yet every time Edger speaks Dyeawan feels silent cords of discontent stretching between every planner being plucked by steel fingers.

She stares back at Edger, her own expression turning hard.

“My name is Dyeawan,” she says, for the first time since she awoke in this place.

Until this moment she’d kept that name to herself, because it was all she had that was hers. None of them knowing it somehow made it more valuable. If they didn’t know her name then they couldn’t take it away from her. Growing up and barely thriving in a place where everything could be taken from her at any time made any possession dear. She’d had her sheet of greased metal and that was enough. When she’d awakened here without it, totally vulnerable to these people, her name was all that was left.

Dyeawan realizes now that she no longer dwells in that place of no possessions and no privacy. She’s no longer Slider from the streets of the Bottoms. Here she can have whatever she wants, and be whatever she wants.

“That’s my real name,” she continues. “I’d like to be called by my real name, please.”

Even Edger falls silent at that, and in that moment she feels something pass between them akin to what she’s just experienced with Quan, that sense of Edger waking to new qualities within her of which he was previously unaware.

“Of course,” he finally says. “And our welcome to you… Dyeawan the planner.”

THE SPARROW GENERAL

SHE SHOULD BE FIRMLY MIRED in the nervy depths of fear and anticipation that precede a battle, but all Evie can think about is how she’s going to squat in this thing if the need arises.