She can’t read him and it galls her that she can’t. Back on Rootsdown she got by on her street smarts; her knack for reading people got her through more pinches than she could count. It has been jarring—to put it mildly—being tossed into upper society full of saints and nobility and finding herself flailing, unable to guess at what they’re thinking. From their body language to their facial expressions, everything sits strange and wrong, and one frown could mean a dozen different things. Right now Duke Argan is inscrutable to her. She’s stymied by a mortar wall from behind which come muffled shouts in a language she cannot understand. “Trust me,” he says, but can she really? She barely knows him. A week ago he was a distant administrator, the high authority in their little neck of the void, someone she never envisioned meeting and never wanted to. Now he’s someone she’s watched partying and praying in equal fervor for a week, and she still doesn’t know him.

To be fair, he doesn’t know her either. He still thinks she’s wise and holy, some sacred nixen sent by the Larex Forge to end the war with the Heretics. Idiot. Sucker. Fool.

He holds out a hand. “Come with me, Misery.” Then a subtle flick of the head, pointed and urgent. “Before the rest of them get here.” She follows his sightline and it hits her that he’s indicating the white saints, who are not under his command. Whose orders are they taking, then? The Emperor’s? Enough playing. This is getting out of hand.

“All right,” she says, moving like she’s going to take the Duke’s offered hand. He expects that she’s going to take his offered hand.

Misery makes a fist, shuts off the holy tigereye, and leaps backward.

Gravity is acceleration, and loss of gravity is change in acceleration. Misery feels it in her bones as she sails an arc in a backflip, high over the row of white saintly heads. It’s freeing, when you know to expect it. Less so when you don’t. Below her, shouts of dismay and flailing at the gravity going off, but she’s already focused on the next thing, and she flicks off the holy obsidian for the heartbeat it takes her to cross its threshold. She’s in the free space, falling at the speed of holy tigereye, park tier receding in her vision as she makes sure to double the strength of the holystone’s pull in the garden.