So they decided to make Hu’s life into an instrument of control over Baru.

But Tain Hu would not allow it. Tain Hu would not be an armature of slavery.

And now Baru had entered the innermost circle of Imperial power without any hostage to control her.

Oh gods, Hu, I cannot believe what we’ve done. I cannot believe what I must do next. And yet I am … I am exultant. I am so excited to challenge the power that rules us. I am so excited to become that power.

This is my life’s work and at last now it has begun in earnest.

Baru turned her stinging face to Apparitor, and the man flickered back into her awareness, like the memory of some childhood embarassment springing up uncalled for, as he passed across her midline from blind right to living left.

“I’ll forgive that,” she said, calmly, “on account of your masculine passions.”

“You don’t believe it,” he snarled. He’d hurt his hand on her face and now he was wringing it pathetically. “You don’t really believe all that Incrastic nonsense about degenerate mating—you can’t really believe it? A woman from Taranoke?”

“You and I,” she said, spitting blood, grinning at him red-toothed, “you and I will be great colleagues, don’t you think?”

“Tell me,” he said, pleading now, “that you don’t believe it?”

“Raise the corpse,” Baru ordered. “Chop up the meat and scatter it for the gulls.”

Apparitor pulled her around so hard she almost fell again. Her blindness—half the world, her entire right hemisphere, hidden from her awareness by a blow to the brain—swept south and then east, blotting out the ocean toward Taranoke her home, and then Oriati Mbo, and at last Falcrest, the heart of the Imperial Republic. Baru imagined her emptiness covering them, spreading, down past Oriati Mbo through the barrier jungles to Zawam Asu and out then into the sky and across the stars.

Apparitor started to shake her, wide-eyed and furious, that pale freckled face of his high with blood-color. He smelled of fresh laundry. He said, “She deserves a funeral!”

“Traitors don’t get funerals.”

“Then an autopsy! Surely her traits should be recorded—”

“We’ve nothing to learn from traitors. Cut her up for the birds.” When the marines hesitated, Baru spread her hands, palms up, who am I, have you forgotten? “I said cut her up!”

Not even in death would Tain Hu serve Falcrest: not even as a pickled specimen or an entry in a catalogue of mental deformity. Baru would never let them map the rot of her body, never let them say, decomposition began in her liver, which had struggled to contain her sin.…