He splashed water from the bath on his face. “You know he’ll come for me.”

“Not once he realizes what we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?”

“Completing our mission,” Baru said, and waited, breathless, for him to faint.

He swayed, sighed, inhaled sharply. “I can’t do what you want.”

They had to discuss it elliptically, lest his conditioning trigger again. Baru sat on the bed and smoothed out the sheets. “It would be enough,” she said, “if you accompanied me while I trailed my coat.”

“What good would it do? I’ll just look like any other Oriati boy.”

“Not if you say the words.”

“The words—” The bathtub rattled and sloshed in his grip. “The words. Yes.”

He slipped into the tub like a gymnast, arms pommelled on the handles, feet pointed. Wordlessly Baru offered him soap and a razor. He went to work. Baru was fascinated to see him shaving his pubic hair down. “Is that safe?”

“Svir likes it.”

“How odd.”

“If I want to go back to Helbride, will you let me?”

“You’ll have to sit in a quarantine boat for a while.”

“But you won’t stop me.”

Baru considered the point of her pen. She had the urge to whirl and snatch Iraji’s razor from his hands, to throw it out the window into the sea, where it couldn’t hurt him: where he couldn’t hurt himself. She shut her eyes. She wanted very badly to weep for him.

“I wouldn’t stop you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Baru knew she had weaknesses as a thinker. She was arrogant, self-centered, and blind to what she disdained. But she believed that she really was a savant, in the Incrastic sense: gifted with particular insights, sudden knife-tip revelations, stabbed up from her subconscious. Often enough her deductions struck the truth. Not often enough to be perfectly reliable; not often enough to trust without danger.

But enough, now, to help Iraji tell a little more of his story. “May I ask some questions?”

“I’ll put my feet up,” he said, and did. His face subsided into a little moon in the bath. “It keeps me from fainting, sometimes. You’ll save me if I—but of course you will.”

“Of course I will. So. Ah.” She picked at the seams of the sheet. “You left them as a child?”

“Yes,” the Iraji-moon said. “I was afraid of the … I was afraid of them. So I walked into a Masquerade school.”

“You knew they’d follow you. So you sought protection. You went where they couldn’t ever find you.”

“They love me,” Iraji whispered. “They need me.”

“Why?”

“Because I was meant to inherit one of the Lines.”

“What does that mean?”