Baru shivers at this sudden and quite surreal turn toward erotica: she is still bound to this cold Throne, and she still holds her lobotomy pick. Those things do not belong in a fantasy of brown and muscled Hu padding up to her with a sword, displaying to Baru the incalculable ways in which her body is (and still remains) the most ferociously arousing thing Baru has ever seen. The cuts and bands of muscle beneath her smooth, dark-scarred body, strength which appears in unexpected places as she looks about and stretches, as if to say, I am made to do everything well. The perfect definition of her back, down which Baru has spent minutes running her hands. Baru has seen plenty of breasts, but likes Hu’s best, although she would struggle to describe them in particularities: but above this list of specifics Baru likes something about the totality of Hu, an ease and power which Baru did not see in her fellow schoolgirls, or even in the wary adults of post-occupation Iriad. She moves, Baru realizes, a little like Ulyu Xe, with that same unity of purpose. But where Xe is tranquil and reactive, Tain Hu prowls. She pounces. She has the smug mastery of a large cat.

This is what Tain Hu shares with Tain Shir: a sense that she is her own dominion, unmastered by the world.

She steps out of her trousers: she unties her linens and lets them fall. Baru realizes with a shock of horror how this dream or hallucination will end—Tain Hu is going to die naked on her knife. Tain Hu will writhe against Baru in carnal desire and then Baru will stab her and Tain Hu will die in blood—her last moans a poisonous admixture of agony and orgasm.

Sick. Sick. The technique is abominable.

“No,” Hu says, in response to her thoughts, “it’s not like that. Or—it is, yes, that will happen, because that’s how they want it to go, but you taught me how to beat them. Look.”

Tain Hu reaches the throne. She flicks her blade here, and there, and cuts away the ropes that bind Baru’s right arm. Suddenly she can move again! She tries to hurl away the lobotomy pick in horror—

And Tain Hu closes her fist around the pick, so it can’t get away. “No,” she says. “Hold that. Make it a knife. Yes. Change it into a knife. Like that.”

She snaps the small cords that hold Baru’s mask to her skull and flips it off. Without the mask Baru finds her lobotomy wound gone. She can move her eyes where she pleases now.

Tain Hu’s golden eyes shine back at her, full of trust and love, and Baru is grieved beyond words that she will betray them.

Tain Hu kisses her, fiercely. She bites blood from Baru’s lip and draws away, lingering. “Remember that,” she says. “You’ve been forgetting.”