There were more buttons on the panel than there were doors in the room. I scanned them quickly, reading the Ameng. The lights probably wouldn’t work any longer, but the others might.

“Central door,” I said, and pressed the button marked so; the door on the center wall groaned and creaked, and then thunks echoed through the wall. The Minister standing nearest the central door, the woman with the green collar-light, drew a long knife into one hand. Then she gripped the handle and pulled. The door slid, reluctantly, into the wall. She checked the hallway, then nodded at the ultraviolet Minister.

“How about the right-side door?” I asked, and pressed that button, too. A dull click sounded from the right.

“And the left-side,” I said, and did the same over there.

“I’m going to lock the right again,” I said, and the right side door clicked sealed again.

“And for my final trick,” I said, “I’m going to close up the airlock,” and I pressed the button that I gambled would seal the way to the Viper.

The ground trembled, then, slow and sticking, the aperture of the opening between the Viper and the Nameless began to close like a metal pupil. In the seconds before it sealed, a hand shot up from inside and held the metal in grinding stillness.

Oh, right. There was a Minister inside.

“I’ll open it again,” I promised the ultraviolet Minister, and hit the switch; the closure of the aperture reversed, the metal vanishing into the floor; a moment later a Minister with a red collar light pulled himself free of the Viper, grim-jawed.

The Ultraviolet Minister stared at me with all of her cold immortal attention.

I clasped my hands behind my back, hiding their tremor.

“Satisfied?”

It happened that a week before the Ministers came to Kystrom, while I was heading home from school, I found a cona lying beside the road, long ears lax, little paws twitching. There was blood on her fur, and her rolling eyes were fixed on a tree overhead. When I looked up I saw an owl perched there, glassy eyes staring down at us, blood on his talons.

There are rabbits in the Republican system, of many and varied different species, but none are quite the same as conas. I picked the cona up and brought it home and gave it to Brigid. My sister had been begging for a kitten for weeks, to no avail; an injured baby cona was a far worse pet. You could buy simulated skin for humans to close up gashes at the grocery store, but sim-skin for a cona was not exactly widely available on the market. My mother had glared daggers at me, but Brigid already had the thing cupped in her palms, and there was no going back from there.

The cona wasn’t in my family home when I made it back, on the day the Ministers had come. My parents and Brigid were there, but the cona was not. I didn’t know if it had escaped, or if Brigid had set it free; if the Ministers had killed it they would have left its body for me to find, just like they left Brigid’s.