The rage rose up in her again. Water hammer. That was the name. Water hammer—when you closed a pipe-valve too quickly, or detonated a mine underwater, then a pressure wave would form in the water or the sea. It could tear plumbing from the wall or cave in a ship’s hull. Water hammer. And for a moment she was eleven again, standing on the rusty ladder inside the settlement’s well, with the stone lid propped up on her fingertips: later they would swell up into bloody bulbs. She had watched from that well as the Invijay came through the fences (this was before the Armada War: there was no Occupation to the south to buffer the Butterveldt). She had watched them kill her mother and grandmother and take her father for a slave and a whore. They had that power, the power to end a life, to close the future off like a pipe and send the shock of that closure into the world. Water hammer.

She came back to this little gallery because it reminded her of the well. Stone duty on every side, chaos past those walls. And that water rising under her, rising to beat at the cover, rage and sorrow and need for justice, the water hammer—

Oh, Samne, she thought. How can’t I go after her? The dead cry out for it, don’t they? The sailors I left in Baru’s reach, the sailors who trusted me to trust her. Didn’t I betray them when Baru betrayed me? Didn’t I fail that trust?

Of course Samne Maroyad wouldn’t have sent the message if she thought Ormsment had any way to do something stupid. Any hint as to where to begin.

Which she didn’t. Yet.

But there was another reason Ormsment came to this gallery. A stone hidden in the wall, with a flat white face where she could mark a date and time to meet.

“Hey,” she said, to the blackened foot in the ice. “Hey, you. Do the dead care?”

The foot had nothing to say. She tried clarifying. “Do you care what we do in your name?”

It was a fucking foot, so of course it wouldn’t answer. She had to do an admiral’s duty and decide for herself.

Everyone, Juris Ormsment thought, ended up dead. Everyone. If you stopped mattering when you died, life had no meaning: that was pretty clearly unacceptable. So you did matter after you died. Why? You mattered because people acted in your memory.

The living had a responsibility to the dead. A responsibility to honor their successes, and to make right the wrongs done against them. It was as true for a mother of dead sons as an admiral of dead sailors.

And that was that. She could choose not do it, of course. But a choice not to do the right thing had a name, and that name was evil.