The laman seemed to make Apparitor uncomfortable too, or, at least, self-conscious: his eyes skittered over their hips and up their soft proud throat, where they had painstakingly reapplied the golden paint of their station. Baru remembered Apparitor saying, a man can become a woman, or a woman a man, depending on how they dress and act—but what we hate, in the Mansions, is a liar.

Who did not carry their childhood prejudices? Even Tain Hu had looked down on the Belthyc people. Even Baru would sneer at a plainsider.

“Firing range in ten seconds,” Branne reported.

INS Sulane came straight at them.

“Masks on,” Apparitor ordered.

Baru reached up and slid the porcelain half-mask down over her head and looked back up again, faced now in white, like bone. Apparitor’s banner of hair streamed out from behind a mask marked around the right eye with the silver polestar. Captain Branne’s full-face sea mask glistened with oily filters and the weathering of harsh eastern seas. Execarne slid on his dull varnished wood. Yawa’s black judge mask shone with faint purple highlights. Together they faced the mutineers.

Tau-indi Bosoka and the Enact-Colonel Osa looked at each other. Baru watched the Prince shiver.

“We’re in firing range,” Branne said.

Sulane did not launch.

“Keep course,” Branne ordered. “They’ve got the fighting rudder. It’s on them to turn off.”

Sulane came closer yet. Waves split across her prow like tendons on a scalpel. Baru counted the spears that lined her rails, and the red-masked marines who stared back at her, and the count brought her no comfort.

A ship’s girl looked up from her chart of figures. “We’re in the fifty-fifty bracket.” Any rocket fired from Sulane now stood a coin’s chance of striking Helbride’s rigging and dooming them all.

“She’s adjusting course again,” Branne reported. “Correcting for the wind. She’ll ram us in two minutes.”

Baru raised the spyglass, and beheld her.

The killing woman stood on Sulane’s bowsprit, half-crouched, bare-footed, her weight low and swaying as the frigate chopped through the waves. She wore knives across her chest and a bug-eyed mask. The mass of her calves flexed and relaxed with feline ease. The storm crossbow in her arms could have lanced a harpoon into a good-sized whale.

She raised a hand and pointed.

You. I want you.

Baru could have vomited, so sudden and profound was the fear. Would she haul Ulyu Xe out onto the bowsprit and keelhaul her while Baru watched? Would she drag Baru’s parents in a net behind Sulane until they came apart for the sharks?

Xate Yawa inhaled hard, and did not speak.

Then Sulane began to shout. The officers led the crew and the crew called out across wind and waves. The human mind has an ear for the human voice, and Baru heard clearly:

SAVE YOURSELVES, the mutiny bellowed. LEAP THE RAIL. SWIM TO US.