“It’s not the same,” Baru protested. “Those terms were set by the Throne. A power that holds the world—I couldn’t change the terms. You, though, you could walk away right now. Please, Shir.” The name a thorn in her tongue. “I remember you. I remember when I saw you at Farrier’s wool stand. There’s no reason you have to do this.”

“I’m not doing this,” Shir said, with terrible distance. “You are. You set the terms. This is your choice, it is the shape of you, to spend people for power. I am your teacher now. I am going to force this choice on you. Here, and in the next place you go, and the next, and the next, I will force this choice on you forever. And so you will live in a world governed by the laws you have chosen.”

“You don’t even know what I want!”

“I don’t care.” Her spare hand settled on a grenade: DANGER INCENDIARY DANGER ADHESIVE ALL-PURPOSE BURN. “I kill you, or I kill this woman. Later the choice will come again. The diver will be next. Then your parents.”

Baru neither screamed nor sagged in horror. She did the one thing she had always done when overcome. She thought. With exacting, scrupulous detail she thought of Ulyu Xe pinned to a tree by a bolt through her chest. She thought of Pinion and Solit bound inverted upon great wooden wheels and hacked open from groin down to throat so the chevrons of their ruptured bodies were chalices for the insects and the birds. She thought of these icons of horror and she thought of them as the result of her choices. For if she proceeded as she always had, by giving up a life to gain a little more progress, then Shir would offer her these choices forever, and forever she would be forced to choose.

Surely she could justify any sacrifice. To stop now would be to betray those lives she’d already spent … and the more lives she spent, the more reason she had to sacrifice even more …

She was trapped.

But she forced herself (and force it was, like peeling herself naked from a frozen steel plate, straining her skin until it tore and wept) to think logically. If she survived this moment, she could reach Helbride. She would have access to the Throne’s resources again. Shir was only one mortal woman. Shir could be killed.

One life could be invested to achieve that goal. Hadn’t Baru’s choices already slaughtered thousands? One more life. Only do not look at her eyes.

“All right,” Baru said. “Kill her.”

The machete moved.

*   *   *

EXECARNE carried her screaming to the glider ledge.

Through pain like a red sun Baru saw the green-gray sea tossing below, Helbride’s sails in the near distance, the rows of wood-and-canvas gliders that waited on their hooks above.

She could only scream.