“They can be,” Ashley said. She floundered. I could see tension in her neck and shoulders as she stood there, effectively skewered after having been invited to share something personal. Was that a trap? If she hadn’t shared enough, would they paint her as deceptive?

I wanted to fault Miss Militia for throwing us in the deep end of this pool, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t expected this to be this, and I got that there wasn’t a great way to fill a bunch of kids in on what looked to be a very subtle and complex form of debate. There were probably a lot of sub-rules and points of decorum. She’d committed us to their custom by advising us, at least to a small degree, but she had to think that doing the alternative would hurt more.

“Yosef was a soldier,” Luis said. “He saw a lot of that ugliness.”

“I earned some prestige,” the other diplomat said. “We don’t see much war, we’ve seen its price, but when she arrived, some of us fought back. She beheaded us again and again, until we had no leadership to speak of. We thought it was a victory if it took thirty of us to kill one of their kind. I killed one, a girl younger than her—”

He indicated Kenzie.

“—but with the losses we incurred, it was not a victorious day. It was only a personal victory and a release for me to put my shoe-heel to her head until she died, after all I had lost.”

Sveta put her hands to her mouth.

“The poor child,” Miss Militia said. “She was enraptured by the Blue Empress.”

“She was what she was,” Yosef said, to Miss Militia. To Ashley, he said, “That is why I stand here with the station I have, talking to you. I killed one and I played a part in killing another.”

Ashley answered, “I stand where I do now not because of what I did, but because I put distance between that self of mine. I tried to gather a small army of thugs beneath me and claim a share of a city for myself.”

“That would be your Slaughterhouse, then,” Yosef said, and I was ninety percent sure he knew it wasn’t as he jumped to his conclusion.

“No,” Ashley said.

“A violent word, Slaughterhouse,” Yosef said.

So this was the rebuke, if someone tried to be slippery or dodge a topic and got called on it. I wondered about the extent to which it mattered. Was there a point system? Were their cultural attitudes the sort to call out this sort of thing?

The statement was an invitation, a question without being a question, demanding elaboration.

“They were a band of killers. If the Blue Empress’s worst were monsters, then I’m sure they were similar to the Slaughterhouse.”