She did not miss court life. It had been dull, every day having the same flavors and textures. There had been no excitement, rather a pleasant medium, a state of complacency as much as anything. Things were so different here—every meal Dabry made for them was different, and he was patient about explaining the origins and particulars of things, like the way he had shown her to take leaves and fold each around a dab of the sour, pungent paste called agrat, then add a dab of sweet syrup and fold again to contain that. It had been a slow meal, the one that began with those, and Niko raised an eyebrow when she saw the leaves, but Dabry had said, “Might as well enjoy them, they’re doing us no good at the present.”

Those words had made Niko flinch at their underlying pragmatism, but then she nodded. They’d all enjoyed the meal, and Atlanta could tell that Dabry had enjoyed them enjoying it. As he’d told her, it was the thing that he liked about being a chef, knowing that he’d hit his mark as precisely as any archer or sniper could. A hit with more to it, even, because it rang on so many levels, where a missile had only one: how much damage it did.

She tried revisiting her advisors, but they simply stood silently while she thought about all of this. They were not programmed to lead her in any particular way of thinking; they were supposed to speak only when she evoked them. When she was little, she had tried to get around that, had tried to make them seem more like friends. That was the main point of them, to make you feel that you had a set of friends that you could always count on to advise you.

But how much did they matter when they could do nothing to actually help you, could only stand by and look sympathetic while you tried to figure out what to do? They could not get a message out; they were incapable of accessing or being accessed by any of the public datawebs, lest they get compromised or hacked. They could not heal her body or feed her or give her shelter. They didn’t even have maps other than teaching ones or the basics of the palace, and the routes that she used every day there.

She spoke to them. She said, “Is it possible that all of this is a test set to me by the Empress?”

They considered this for the second that was more for her benefit than theirs. Their processors were lightning fast, she knew, and powered by her own energy. The chip that hosted them was nestled at the top of her skull, barely the size of her smallest fingernail.