Tain Shir plunges her own filter into her canteen and fits it into her mask and her lungs fill up with a sharp ether stink like something you would only drink when already drunk. Ormsment commanded Shir to slip her marines in ahead of Sulane’s bombardment and secure the Ministry station below the surface. The admiral hopes that when Baru flees she will flee below. Shir obeys this plan because it is in accordance with her own.

She has come to Moem as a teacher. She has a lesson to impart today.

Yesterday she found the letter left for her at the Eddyn mailhouse. Baru is going to the Morrow Ministry station on Moem. Baru needs your lessons, Shir. She swam to Moem in the night and arranged her blind among the saltgrass. Beneath the pale aurora she watched as Baru seduced the diver. She felt no shame in her voyeurism for the satisfaction of another woman’s appetite is as uninteresting to her as a cow’s progress on its cud.

What matters is the lie. The lie that Baru Cormorant ever loved her cousin Hu. See how she takes her satisfaction with another woman. See how she does not even pretend to mourn.

Hu was deceived.

In the middle hours of the candle watch, Shir returned to Sulane and the province admiral. “Baru is here. She is on Moem. It may be a trap.”

She watched the rage sluice through the Admiral. Juris Ormsment has been building millwork to harness her fury. “We’ll strike at dawn,” she commanded.

Dawn has come. Today Shir teaches a lesson. A lesson for Baru on the nature of the world she has chosen to inhabit.

*   *   *

“FIVE,” the sergeant at the front of the column calls. “Four three two one go.”

He swings around the corner into the black mouth of the tunnel. His crossbow searches for targets. Shir comes around after him. They go down into the Ministry station two by two so that if they are shot they can drag each other to cover. In the narrow stone slots they have no shields and must gamble entirely on speed.

Shir hears Oriati cries echoing through the bowels of the mesa. “They’ve found bodies,” she tells the sergeant, translating the Takhaji battle language. “Something killed the Ministry staff. The Oriati fear gas or plague.”

“Do we go on?” he asks.

She puts a hand on the join of his shoulder and his throat. “Don’t stop.”

In the station’s north bunkroom Falcresti corpses have soaked rotting into their feather mattresses. Ten Oriati grenadiers in steel cuirasses and colorful spinal flags circle the chamber with rags at their mouths. They are giving the dead last blessings for their voyage through the Door.

“Flare,” Shir whispers.