Taru raises one arm behind Lexi, and it might as well be a tree felled across the road to everyone standing behind it. Taru waits until Lexi has boarded the carriage, and then drops their arm and ducks under the short roof of the conveyance.

“Toward the back, Te-Gen, please,” Taru bids her.

They guide Lexi to a seat in one of the rear corners of the carriage, where Taru can stand above her and survey the rest of the space and everyone else occupying it.

The rest of the passengers shuffle aboard, filling the pewlike seats lining the carriage rail and filling the middle of its narrow space. Stragglers stand in the aisles, reaching up and gripping loops of strong silk hung from the ceiling for that purpose.

When it is filled to capacity, the cable attached to the street-facing end of the carriage begins reeling it back out of the berth.

Lexi stares over the rail, looking down at the top of the Capitol buildings.

“That business about your knife… what did he call it, a hook-end?”

Taru draws in a deep breath, exhaling with their next words.

“By the ports they secure the hulls of newly crafted boats with metal hooks. They are easy to pry loose and sharpen to an edge.”

The many implications of that swirl in Lexi’s mind, and she turns away from the rail to look up at her retainer.

“When did you fashion your first hook-end?” Lexi asks.

“I was seven years old, Te-Gen.”

“And did you ever bloody an Aegin?”

“Aegins are not all bad people. But they are in the Bottoms.”

Lexi reaches up and takes Taru’s free hand, the one not perpetually grasping the hilt of a blade, in both of hers. Lexi doesn’t say anything, and neither does Taru, although they don’t attempt to withdraw their hand. Lexi feels the many hardened calluses of swinging a blade every day, even if only in practice. She feels scars, dozens of splits in Taru’s knuckles scabbed over with time, the raised remnants of cuts that now feel like thread woven through their skin.

Lexi becomes aware of a connection, and it both breaks her heart and opens her mind’s eye. She realizes she can read the entire story of Taru’s life with her eyes closed, just by holding their hand, by letting herself feel the tiny monuments erected there, tombstones and effigies carved in Taru’s flesh.

It makes Lexi want to weep.

Instead she smiles up at the retainer warmly, squeezing Taru’s hand between hers before letting it go and turning back to the rail.

The sky carriage is pulled down one of the Capitol’s long main arteries, stopping alongside single platforms perched atop thinner columns at the corner of every third or fourth block. Passengers exit, permitting new ones on.