“Let’s get together with Apparitor tonight,” she suggested, fumbling for some way to help him, some answer to his pleas for a friend, “and play Purge?”

He looked up at her with entirely inexplicable dread.

“Yes,” he said, smiling with only his mouth. “Let’s.”

*   *   *

WITH her dive knife Baru slashed open the letters from her parents. She sorted them by date, waited briefly and pointlessly over a rag in case she wept, and began to read. There would be two hard places, she expected. First, after she defected to the Coyotes: would her parents have dared to write, would they have said, at last, you are truly our daughter? We are so proud.

And second—

After Sieroch—when they learned that she’d betrayed the Coyotes—

Fuck it, though! So what if it hurt? Control the pain, Baru, get the information, add it to your plan. Are they all right? You have to know! Baru grabbed the top letter, scrabbled at its stuck-together pages, hissed as she cut the tip of her thumb, and at last, with a little print of blood, unfolded it against the deck.

At the top of the letter Mother Pinion had sketched a cormorant, surfacing from a dive, her hooked beak raised to the sun. The low sharp contours of Halae’s Reef in the background.

Baru exploded into sobs.

She did not cry. She mastered her furious homesickness. Letter by letter she followed her parents’ lives and the patterns of them leapt up to kiss her.

Mother Pinion wrote the body of the letter in shorthanded Urunoki, and Solit then scribbled comments and designs in the margins. Pinion sent drawings she’d taken during her work as a surveyor and message-runner. Solit rather favored diagrams of clever devices he’d encountered or made while working in the Iriad shipyards, where, he reported soberly, he helped the Imperial Republic prepare its brave new fleet, which would protect the seas from “Oriati aggression.” Together they intimated small acts of sedition, confided to Baru the traditions they’d kept safe from the brackish Falcrest tide, and hinted at occasional lovers, including a plainsider woman. That shocked Baru: a plainsider? But perhaps the occupation had brought plainside and harborside together—

And there was—

—a code!

Baru could feel the bumps of information carved into the negative space between words. She couldn’t articulate what exactly she’d detected. Were the spaces between the letters somehow systematically arranged? Would the first letters of each line spell out a message? Perhaps if she translated it all into Aphalone …

A plainsider lover? Really? Plainsiders raided, stole, and trafficked with pirates. Obviously some of that had to be prejudice, certainly the plainsiders believed harborsiders were corrupt, haughty, and tightfisted … but a plainsider lover?

And with that clue Baru cracked the code.