She almost cried when she had to admit it. ‘The seventy-sixth, but I’m going to ask for a reassessment. No one reassembles a lasrifle faster than me. I come first in every race and can do more press-ups than anyone else. I push myself. I train without food. Run without water. I run barefoot in the snow. I endure and never complain. In the annual ratings I came second in my barracks. I thought that would be enough.’

‘You think that because you are among the best cadets you should be sent to the best Whiteshield unit?’ She saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. ‘If they put all the best cadets in the best units, what would that achieve?’

Six months later, Jorden had died suppressing an uprising on St Josmane’s Hope. When she next came home from White­shield camp, his helmet hung from the wall, the seal of completion stating the time and place of his death. She would never forget what he had told her that afternoon.

‘You should be grateful. They put you in the weakest unit because you are the best. You have an opportunity to show your worth. Be a leader. It is only through the hardest trials that we grow and learn and prove ourselves.’ His violet eyes had been determined. ‘The very hardest trials.’

Minka armoured herself with her cousin’s and her mother’s words the day she left her parent’s hab-cell in the lower buttresses of Kasr Myrak. She stood ramrod straight, silent with shock that she was leaving home. Her pack was light. It held her few possessions. Blanket. Ration tin. Water bottle. Cord. Thread. Needles. Whiteshield issue medi-pack: bandage, blood-clotting gel, counter­septic powder. A knife her father had given her. A copy of The Uplifting Primer.

Her suit of Militarum surplus Cadian drab was three sizes too large, the boots too big. She had punctured extra holes in her belt to get it to fit, bound the flapping ends of her trousers tight with Cadian drab puttees, but as she strode through the streets she felt like the lord governor primus, the commander of Cadia.

That winter, the 76th Myrak Whiteshields brigade were posted an hour north of the city in the round-topped hills that ringed Kasr Myrak.

‘Have faith in the Emperor,’ her mother said as the row of cargo-8s waited. ‘If you do not like the standard of the seventy-sixth then ask yourself what you can do to improve it.’

Tarli was also there to see her off. Minka loved her brother. Of all her siblings they were closest in age. He wanted to be a shock trooper even more than she did.

‘When you go, I will be all alone,’ he said. The thought was unbearable to him.