“Go on!” she snapped, and the whore, pale as terror, went. She wanted to call after him, to apologize, to give him fare for a cart ride back to town.

But she was late.

Aminata gathered her things for the bath, lifted up her uniform jacket, and blew a speck of grit from the collar. She would go out there and do her damn best. She would make it. She was more than her home.

That was what the merchant Cairdine Farrier had told her, back on Taranoke, when he’d recruited her for his scheme to protect Baru by frightening the shit out of her: he had said we can all be more than our bloody birth.

*   *   *

SHE stopped at the guard post to check her mail. No one ever wrote, but like the prisoner with the lever, she always checked, because maybe, maybe today …

The Lever was a trick she’d used on Abdumasi Abd, and he’d fallen for it, he’d fallen so hard that he’d broken the lever in his cell (they were built to break). When it snapped in his arms he’d wept in despair.

Lapetiare’s captain had once told Aminata, drunkenly, that life worked exactly like that lever. Did the lever give you a gum pellet with a little bead of opiate every time you pulled it? No, of course not. Give a prisoner a lever that worked that way and he’d pull it only when he wanted a fix. But give him a lever with a tiny random chance of yielding a pellet on each pull—

Then he spends his whole life pulling. Because every moment he’s not pulling that lever, he’s wasting a chance.

Navy life, the captain said, was built just the same way. If you knew exactly what you had to do to earn your promotion, you wouldn’t be properly motivated, would you? But with a little uncertainty—a little corruption, a little racial preference, a spice of terror and purge—then you’d work your ass off, wouldn’t you? Lest you miss your big break.

Aminata hated to believe that. But some days she felt it anyway. No rest. No reprieve. Life is random and unfair, so you must pull that lever until your arms break out of their sockets—

—and someone had written.

Aminata gasped. The letter was from Aurdwynn.

She knifed the seal open, tight-lipped, steady-fingered. It must be from Baru, it must! Some kind of explanation. Baru had definitely only pretended to go over to the rebels. The ships sunk at Welthony Harbor had been full of convicts, not real sailors. She’d been thinking constantly of Aminata, and only her work had kept her from writing—

Cheap paper. That didn’t make sense for Baru. Marks told her it posted from Welthony a few weeks back. The Coyote rebellion had died near Welthony, hadn’t it? On the plains at Sieroch?

Oh no. Was Baru…?