When they stiffened suddenly into a kind of attention, Bellis knew their superiors had arrived. Two men and a woman were standing by the ship’s rail. The murderer-the grey-armored leader of the raiding party-stepped up to join them. His clothes and sword were now quite clean.

The younger man and the woman stepped forward to the swordsman. When Bellis saw them she could only stare.

The man wore a dark grey suit; the woman a simple blue dress. They were tall and held themselves with immense authority. The man had a trim mustache and an easy arrogance. The woman’s features were heavy and irregular, but the flesh of her mouth was sensual, the cruel cast of her eyes compelling.

What had made Bellis stare at them both with fascination and distaste, what commanded her attention, were the scars.

Curling down the outside of the woman’s face, from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. Fine and uninterrupted. Another, thicker and shorter and more jagged, swept from the right side of her nose across her cheek and curled up as if to cup her eye. And others, contoured to her face. They disfigured her ocher skin with esthetic precision.

Flickering her eyes from the woman to the man, Bellis had felt something curdle inside her. What fucking unhealthiness is this? she had thought uneasily.

He was adorned with identical, but mirrored marks. A long curved cicatrix down the right side of his face, a shorter flourishing cut below his left eye. As if he were the woman’s distorted reflection.

As Bellis watched the wounded pair, aghast, the woman spoke.

"You will have realized by now," she said in good Ragamoll, projecting her soft voice so that everyone could hear, "that Armada is not like other cities."

Is that a welcome?Bellis had thought. Was that all that the traumatized and bewildered survivors of the Terpsichoria were to be offered?

The woman had continued.

She told them about the city.

Sometimes she was silent, and without a pause the man would speak. They were almost like twins, finishing each other’s sentences.

It had been hard to listen to what they were telling her. Bellis was agog at the feelings she saw pass between the scarred man and woman every time they glanced at each other. Above all a hunger. Bellis had felt unstuck in time: as if she were dreaming this arrival.

Later, she would realize that she had absorbed much of what had been said, that it had passed into her and been processed at some level below consciousness. It came out as she began to live in Armada, against her will.

At the time, all she had been aware of was the couple’s shared intensity, and the stunned excitement that greeted the woman’s final sentence.

The words had reached Bellis full seconds after they were spoken, as if her skull were some thick medium through which sound traveled sluggishly.

There was a massed gasp and a whoop and then a swell of incredulous cheering, a huge breaking wave of joy from the hundreds of exhausted Remade prisoners who stood shivering and stinking. It rose and rose, at first tentative and then rapidly delirious with triumph.