Aboard the Red Cliff Survivor, the day's labor gives way to the ragged communion of the mess circle. The air hangs thick with the smells of salt, tar, and a stew that is less a recipe and more a territorial dispute between a salted fish and a handful of defiant lentils. The crew sprawls across the deck, a mosaic of weary limbs and sharp eyes, their faces gilded by the dying light.

Shan Xi presides from her customary perch on the larboard rail, a stick of ginger between her teeth like a general's cigar. Her gaze, temple-lantern calm, sweeps over the assembled: her pirates, the steppe warriors, the boy. It is a fragile ecosystem, and she is its apex predator.

"A decree," she announces, her voice cutting through the low murmur. She points her ginger stick at Yotaka, who sits quietly between a coil of rope and a sleeping Notso. "The boy is Lizi's. Consider him a rash she picked up in a dirty port. Polite is an illness he caught at sea. She is responsible for his symptoms."

Lizi puffs out her chest, preening like a bedraggled peacock. "At last! A promotion! I shall teach him all the best curses and how to lose at dice with dignity!"

"A monumental task," Auntie Fang grunts, not looking up from the knot she is teasing apart with a dagger. "The boy sweeps better than you fight."

Yotaka offers a small, careful bow of his head. "I will endeavor to be a tolerable affliction."

The circle ripples with snorts and grim smiles. The integration begins with the sharing of scars, verbal and otherwise. It starts with Na'er, sharpening a hook with a rhythmic shhh-click, shhh-click.

"Drill calls," she mutters, her eyes distant. "Before dawn. Through the thin walls of the dockside slums. A sound like a metal throat clearing, over and over, until you want to scream just to break the monotony." She looks up, her gaze finding the Seop-born faces in the crew. "You could set your life by that noise. If you wanted a life that dull."

An older pirate named Mei, her face a roadmap of old battles, spits neatly over the rail. "Dock taxes on a woman's earnings. They'd weigh you at the gate. A price for your body, just for the right to carry cargo on it. Like we were barrels of flour." She says it without heat, a simple statement of fact more terrifying than any rant.

"Of course they revolted," Auntie Fang says, her voice a low rumble. She finally looks up, her eyes holding a century of weary contempt. "We just left first."

Puripal, who has been observing with the quiet intensity of a cartographer mapping unknown shores, sees his opening. He leans forward, his hands resting on his knees, the picture of princely empathy.

"The weight of such memory is a heavy burden," he offers, his voice melodious and sincere. "You have my condolences for the injustices you endured."

The circle goes quiet for a beat too long. Then Pragya, without looking up from the foul-smelling poultice she is grinding in her mortar, answers. "Keep your silk pity, prince. It'll just get stained. If you're feeling burdened, the pump handle is that way. It's excellent for venting sorrows. Also for keeping the ship from sinking. A versatile tool."

A burst of laughter erupts, sharp and cleansing. The tension, a palpable thing moments before, vents like steam from a valve. Puripal, expertly rebuffed, offers a slight, gracious smile and leans back, his lesson learned. Pity is a currency without value here.

The stew-pot makes its rounds. Bowls are filled, complaints about the taste are issued with ritualistic fervor, and the business of bonding continues.

Lizi elbows the man next to her, a Yohazatz raider named Tolui who looks terrified of her. "You see?" she confides, loudly. "This is how you build morale. First, you share terrible food. Then, you share terrible memories. Eventually, you're willing to die for each other. It's very efficient."

Tolui just stares at his bowl, as if hoping it will transform into something recognizable.

Meanwhile, Yotaka is performing his own quiet diplomacy. He offers a piece of his hardtack to Notso, who accepts it with a slobbering gratitude that threatens to wash the boy away. Dukar watches this, his amber eyes softening infinitesimally.

"He has a way with beasts," Temej observes, settling beside him, his own gaze on the eagle, Sartak, perched preternaturally still on the aft rail.

"Beasts are simpler than people," Dukar replies. "Their loyalty is not a currency. It is a fact."

Shan Xi's voice cuts back in, pulling the threads of the conversation together. "The Seop lords thought their rules were iron. That their taxes and their drills and their weights could define a person." She takes a bite of her ginger, chewing thoughtfully. "They forgot the first rule of the sea."

"What's that?" Lizi asks, playing her part as the eager student.

"That anything, given enough pressure and time, can leak. And we," she smiles, a thin, sharp thing, "are the leak."

...

The gold hour bleeds across the deck, a liquid, honeyed light that catches the salt-scabbed rails and turns them to bronze. The world seems hushed, holding its breath between the day's labor and the night's unknowns. In a pool of isolation between two such lights, where the shadows are deepest and the deck is clear, Shan Xi and Puripal have found an unspoken truce of proximity.

Shan Xi lounges against the capstan, the iron fan in her hand not as a weapon, but as a subject of study. She traces a fingertip along its etched slats. "The smith who made this was drunk on liturgy and regret," she muses, her voice a low contrast to the wind in the rigging. "He inscribed prayers for mercy. Tiny, beautiful things. Then he tempered the steel in the blood of a man who begged for it." She extends the fan, not offering it, but presenting it. The dim light catches the microscopic script, making the pleas for compassion gleam coldly on the instrument of pain. "I had the prayers filled with powdered iron."

Puripal observes, his head tilted. The faint glow catches the subtle line of a jade ear-cuff he wears, a simple, understated curve of pale green stone against the dark of his hair. No gold, no ostentation, just the pure, dense weight of the earth itself. "A translation," he says, his voice as calm as deep water. "From devotion to utility. A common enough story in these times."

"Utility?" Shan Xi's smile is a sickle moon. "This is beyond utility. This is a language. The language of 'come closer' and 'I will now separate your soul from your body,' spoken in the same breath." Her eyes lift from the fan to his ear. "Yours is quieter. It whispers."

He reaches up, his touch light on the jade. "It was my mother's. The only piece she owned that wasn't dictated by court fashion. She said it was cut to remember the shape of the mountain where her grandmother was born. Not a symbol of power, but a memory of it." He lets his hand fall. "It reminds me that what is truly powerful often needs no announcement."

"A noble sentiment." Shan Xi snaps the fan closed with a sound like a cracking knuckle. "And a dangerous one. The world is full of fools who mistake silence for weakness. Sometimes, a loud, ugly declaration is the kindest warning you can offer."

"Perhaps," Puripal concedes. "But a declaration that is too loud often fails to hear the approach of the real threat. It is too busy listening to its own voice." He gestures slightly with his chin towards her fan. "Your scripture is written in iron. Mine is written in lineage. Both are forms of armor. Both can be used to cut."

She barks a short, genuine laugh. "So the pretty prince has teeth after all. I was wondering." She leans forward, the light carving the sharp lines of her face. "Let us be translators, then. You look at my fan and you see a story of violence remade. I look at your cuff and I see a story of land and blood, a claim that needs no seal because it is worn in the flesh." Her eyes narrow, not in suspicion, but in focused calculation. "This is how we understand each other. Not through pretty words of alliance, but through the metal and stone we choose to carry. Your quiet claim and my loud warning… they might just be the same sentence in different tongues."

Puripal meets her gaze, and for the first time, the placid, unreadable calm in his eyes shifts, revealing a glint of sharp, intellectual respect. The flirtatious tension of their first meeting has evaporated, burned away in the crucible of this shared understanding. They are not potential lovers; they are potential co-conspirators, recognizing in each other a masterful command of symbol and substance.

"Then let us hope," he says, his voice barely a whisper, "that when the time comes to speak, our dialects are compatible."

Shan Xi's smile softens from a blade into something more nuanced, more dangerous. It is the smile of a gambler who has just seen a card that makes the entire reckless wager worthwhile.

...

At the starboard rail, away from the dispersing mess circle, two figures lean against the weathered wood, their silhouettes outlined in fire. Temej, his green eyes reflecting the dying sun, and Dukar, his presence a settled, stoic weight. Between them, Notso lies in a sprawling, wheezing heap, his flanks rising and falling in a rhythm of pure, uncomplicated contentment.

The silence between the two men is not empty; it is filled with the ship's gentle creaking, the whisper of cut water, and the shared gravity of the woman who binds them to this mad enterprise. Temej breaks it, his voice low, not quite a question, more a wondering exhaled into the gilded air.

"Was she always like… this?" He makes a slight, circular gesture with his hand, a motion that encompasses the sheer, terrifying scope of her ambition.

Dukar doesn't answer immediately. His gaze is fixed on the horizon, where sea and sky merge in a blaze of orange and violet. A faint, almost imperceptible smile touches his lips, a crack in the granite of his demeanor.

"There was a saddle," he begins, the words arriving slowly, like stones pulled from a deep well. "Our father's best. Tooled leather, silver fittings—a chief's saddle. A symbol. My sister was twelve or so. She saw that the fletchings on our arrows were rotten, the points dull. So she loaded the saddle onto a trader's wagon while the man was drunk on fermented mare's milk and bartered it for enough good steel and goose feathers to arm twenty riders." He chuckles, a dry, rasping sound. "When our father confronted her, she didn't deny it. She just said, 'A leader rides on the strength of his people, not the richness of his seat.' He was too stunned to whip her."

Temej lets out a low whistle, shaking his head. "Twelve? The spirits were already whispering."

"They were shouting," Dukar corrects him. "Another time, a Moukopl magistrate came to the summer camp. He was a preening little man, all ink-stained fingers and condescending smiles. He started lecturing us on 'settled law' and 'imperial grace.' My sister, she couldn't have been more than eleven, walked right up to him. She didn't shout. She just… asked questions. 'If your law is so settled, why does it change every time a new governor arrives?' 'If your grace is so abundant, why are children still hungry?' She dismantled his entire worldview with the precision of a butcher jointing a goat. The man left flustered and red-faced. The camp cheered. She had duelled him with logic and left him bleeding on the field of his own arrogance."

He falls silent again, the memory playing out behind his eyes. The light deepens, casting long, distorted shadows across the deck. "Then there was the Great White Blizzard," he continues, his voice gaining a subtle warmth. "The year the snows came early and buried the world. The clans were scattered, starving. The elders spoke of hunkering down, of enduring the loss. My sister looked at the blizzard and saw a road. She organized the children and the elderly into chains, had them dig paths between the yurts. She sent the strongest riders on the hardiest horses into the storm, following old, half-forgotten migration routes to where the ice was thinner over the frozen rivers. They broke through and pulled up fish by the hundreds. She turned a siege of snow into a supply line. That was when I knew. My sister wasn't just clever. She could command the very weather to obey her."

From behind a stack of lashed-down crates, a voice pipes up, full of theatrical awe. "She scares the weather."

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Ta's head pops into view, his eyes wide with delight. A moment later, Sen scrambles up beside him, her face smudged with charcoal and her expression one of scientific fervor.

"Confirmed," Sen declares, brandishing a piece of scrap wood covered in frantic calculations. "Based on anecdotal evidence and thermodynamic principles, the energy required to psychologically intimidate a meteorological system is… significant. I'd like to run tests."

Dukar and Temej exchange a look of exasperation for these two agents of chaos.

"The tests would involve a lot of shouting at clouds, wouldn't they?" Temej asks dryly.

"And calibrated kites!" Sen adds, beaming. "Very important, the kites."

Ta leans against the rail, mimicking the posture of the two older warriors. "I once saw her stare down a sandstorm in the Yohazatz wastes. It was just her and Puripal, on a ridge. The rest of us were huddled under wet felt. The wind was screaming, tearing at the tents. But she just stood there, her coat whipping around her, not moving an inch. The storm… it seemed to part around her. Like it was afraid to get too close." He shivers, not from cold, but from the memory of that raw, untamable will.

"That never happened," Dukar sighs, too tired to continue this conversation.

...

The dusk deepens on the quarterdeck, the sky a bruised palette of violet and indigo. The world has shrunk to the circle of lantern light illuminating a massive, upturned crate that serves as a makeshift desk. The galley hatch is a mouth of warmth and scent in the cool, salt-scrubbed night, exhaling the ghosts of burnt porridge and steeped medicinal herbs. Here, in this cramped nexus of the ship's sustenance, the softest con is underway. Yotaka sits on an upturned bucket, ostensibly shelling peas into a wooden bowl, his movements precise and economical. Lizi hovers nearby, performing the role of doting, if disreputable, mother with theatrical zeal, fiddling with a tangled net and casting loud, proprietary glances his way.

Puripal approaches not like a prince, but like a gentle scholar, his silken presence a quiet anomaly in the functional space. He settles on a sack of rice, folding his legs with an effortless grace that seems to politely refuse the very concept of discomfort.

"The sea air must be a trial after a life ashore," he begins, his voice a model of benign curiosity. He addresses Yotaka, but his eyes briefly acknowledge Lizi. "Your family must have been in the shipping trade? You have the hands of a ledger-keeper, not a deck-scrubber."

Yotaka doesn't look up. "My mother… dealt in accounts," he says, the lie smooth. "Port fees. manifests."

"A woman of numbers," Puripal nods, as if this is the most fascinating detail in the world. "And your father? Did he share her affinity for arithmetic, or did his passions lie elsewhere?" The question hangs, soft as a falling feather, yet sharp as a needle.

Lizi doesn't let it land. "His father," she announces, slinging an arm around Yotaka's shoulders, "was a man of immense and varied passions! Mostly involving dice, cheap wine, and disappointing several coastal cities simultaneously. A legend!" She grins, a gaptoothed masterpiece of fond delusion. "The boy takes after his mother, thank the tides. Got her head for numbers and her unfortunate tolerance for boiled cabbage."

Yotaka offers a weak, filial smile that doesn't reach his eyes.

Puripal's gaze doesn't waver. "It is a rare skill, to navigate the complex dialects of different ports. Can you curse in Seop, boy? The true, gutter-born syllables that make dockmasters blush?"

Before Yotaka can be tempted to reveal the pristine, courtly Seop buried in his memory, Auntie Fang looks up from where she is mending a net with a bone needle. "Cursing is like net-mending," she intones, her voice like gravel rolling downhill. "You do it with the tools you have, not the ones you wish for. A simple 'fish-guts' said with the right feeling is better than a poet's filth said wrong." She gives Puripal a flat stare. "You look like you'd curse in perfect meter. Probably less effective."

From the gloom near the medicine chest, Pragya speaks without turning. "He's developing a nosiness fever. I can hear the congestion in his questions." She holds up a pungent, raw onion. "I have a poultice for that. It involves this and a great deal of shame. Would you like to proceed, your curiosity?"

The air thickens with the unspoken game. Pei the Drummer chooses this moment to lean into the hatchway, her sticks tapping a soft, impatient rhythm on the frame. Tap-tap. TAP. "Lizi. The forward bilge weeps. It requires a familiar insult. Yotaka. The Captain's tea wants fetching. The pot is judging us all." Her commands are a rescue, a strategic redeployment of assets.

Puripal watches the entire ecosystem of the ship shift to protect its newest, most fragile creature. He sees the seamless web of deflections, the jokes that are shields, the folk wisdom that is a fortress wall.

He looks at Yotaka, who finally meets his gaze. In the boy's eyes, there is no fear, only a profound, weary understanding of the part he must play. He is Lizi's boy. He is polite. He is shelling peas.

A slow, genuine smile spreads across Puripal's face, devoid of victory but filled with a deep, unexpected respect for the perfection of the performance. He raises his hands in a gesture of surrender, his smile a white flag in the warm, herb-scented air.

"My apologies," he says, his voice laced with a newfound warmth. "I was merely making conversation. It seems I have a talent for choosing the wrong topics." He stands, brushing non-existent dust from his trousers. "I yield to the experts in bilge-weeping and tea-fetching."

He gives a slight, almost imperceptible bow, not of a prince to commoners, but of one player acknowledging a masterful move by his opponents. The softest con has held, its defenses unbreached, its secret kept safe within the bustling, loyal heart of the ship.

...

Days pass, and once the night has fully claimed the ship, a vast, velvet drape pierced only by the swaying orbits of storm lanterns, Temej sits before a sheet of expensive, loathsome Moukopl paper, his brow furrowed in a battle of concentration more intense than any fight with steel. A raven's feather, plucked from Sartak's latest catch, is pinched awkwardly in his warrior's grip. He stares at the flowing, alien script he has just attempted, a thing of soft curves and deceitful connections that feel like lies made visible.

"It steals the breath," he grumbles, his voice a low thunder in the quiet. "It steals the mouth's wind and traps it in these… these worm-trails. To read it is to listen to a ghost. To write it is to bury your own voice." He glares at the characters as if they are a personal insult.

Dukar, leaning against the rail nearby with his arms crossed, gives a slow, solemn nod of agreement. The lantern light carves the hard planes of his face, his amber eyes distant. "In the Moukopl army, they gave us orders on scraps like this," he says, the memory a cold stone in his gut. "I was made to translate for the other conscripts. 'Advance fifty paces.' 'Dig latrines here.' 'Die there.' I hated the curves of their words. Each one felt like a collar being tightened. To speak them was to betray the shape of our own tongue, to force the steppe into a box built by scribes."

From the shadows, Sen materializes again, her hands and face smudged with the charcoal she always carries. She cocks her head, her engineer's mind snagging on the problem. "Inefficient," she declares. "A language should be a tool, not a cage. If the container is wrong, build a new one." She upends a small pouch, and a collection of broken charcoal bits and a large, torn scrap of sailcloth spill onto the crate beside Temej's offending paper.

Ta, who has been quietly observing while pretending to adjust a loose buckle on his gear, drifts closer, his curiosity piqued. His recent, hard-won literacy is a shiny new toy. "The words are all hooks and loops," he offers, peering at Temej's work. "Like trying to hold water with a net. Our words are stones. They should be thrown." He picks up a piece of charcoal. "We need signs a knife can cut into bone. Something that remembers it was born from a chisel, not a brush."

A spark ignites in the twilight gloom. Temej looks from his own clumsy script to the rough, honest texture of the sailcloth. He pushes the Moukopl paper aside as if it were contaminated. "Show me," he commands, his voice losing its frustration, gaining the focused intensity of the hunt.

And so, under the emerging stars, the invention begins. It is a strange, beautiful alchemy. Temej speaks a word of Tepr, a guttural, resonant sound that seems to carry the taste of wind and dust. Dukar repeats it, feeling the shape of it in his mouth. Ta, with a surprising delicacy, presses his charcoal to the cloth. Sen, the architect, sees the system, the underlying logic, ensuring the pieces can fit together.

They work deeper into the night, the pile of charcoal nubs diminishing, the sailcloth filling with a stark, beautiful, and utterly new geography of marks. They look like the footprints of eagles, the cracks in sun-baked earth, the patterns of frost on a yurt at dawn.

Finally, Temej leans back, his body aching but his spirit soaring. He looks at the cloth, covered in the birth-cries of a language made visible. He names it, the word coming to him as naturally as breath.

"Kheseg Salkhi," he says. "WindMarks."

...

The Red Cliff Survivor and her sisters become phantoms, masts unshipped, oars muffled in rags, their hulls smeared with tar and ash until they are nothing but deeper patches of darkness on the black water. They slide into the maze of stilt-houses and rotting docks that is the Bo'anem Slump, a place the city pretends to have forgotten. The only sounds are the suck of mudflats and the distant, drunken laughter of those who can still afford to forget.

Shan Xi stands in the bow of a cutter, her face a mask of cold concentration. Pei the Drummer is a statue beside her, one hand resting on the taut skin of a small lap drum. They are met by figures emerging from the reek of fish and tannery chemicals—women with hands like knotted rope and eyes that have seen too many midnights. There are no names exchanged, only hard, quick hugs that speak of shared history and shared hatred.

"The water's hungry tonight," one fixer, a woman missing two fingers, grunts as she takes their mooring line.

"It's about to be fed," Shan Xi replies, her voice low. Behind her, the Yohazatz skiff teams move with a predator's silence, their steppe-born grace adapting unnervingly to the slippery boards. Temej's eagle is a hooded lump on his shoulder, its presence a surreal note of the wild in this urban decay. Pei's hand taps twice, softly, on her drum: thock-thock. The all-clear. The boats are swallowed by the shadows beneath sagging fishing racks and tannery sheds.

The alleys of the Slump are wounds in the city's flesh, narrow and weeping. The infiltration party moves through them like a slow infection. The Seop-born pirates lead, their bodies tense, every sense screaming. Then, the sound comes—a whip-crack, sharp and authoritative, from a militia yard just beyond a crumbling wall. It is followed by the rhythmic, guttural chant of a drill sergeant barking a cadence in the harsh, coastal dialect of the new regime.

The effect is instantaneous. Na'er freezes, her hand flying to a long-faded scar on her forearm. Another pirate named Suyin begins to breathe in short, sharp gasps, her eyes wide with a memory of being weighed and priced on a dock just like this.

Yotaka, hooded and trembling between Pragya and Pragati, hears it too. The dialect is the one spoken in his palace courtyards, but now it is twisted, debased into a tool of brutalization. A specific phrase—"Kneel for the tide!"—barks out, and he flinches. It was the command given before his father's executioners did their work. His small hand shakes uncontrollably until Pragati's calloused fingers close around his wrist, her grip firm but not unkind.

"Breathe," she hisses, her voice a surgeon's scalpel.

Puripal, watching from a few steps behind, sees the trauma etched on the pirates' faces. He sees the way the very air of this place is a poison to them. His usual placid detachment evaporates, replaced by a cold, clarifying anger.

Meanwhile, at the canal mouth, the air hangs thick with the stink of stagnant water and rot. Dukar, Ta, and Sen are belly-crawling along a slick brick ledge, their forms indistinguishable from the tar-dark shadows. Below them, the massive iron sluice gate that controls the flow of freshwater into the Slump rests in its cradle, rusting but formidable.

Dukar's amber eyes miss nothing—the pattern of the two guards' patrol, the lazy arc of their lantern light. He notes the thick chain, the massive lock. Then his gaze fixes on a single, rust-eaten pin near the base of the gate's mechanism. It is corroded to a fragile thread of metal.

"There," he murmurs, pointing.

Ta, squinting, already has a charcoal stub and a scrap of hide in hand. He sketches the mechanism, specifically its weakness—the pin, the leverage point, the wedge that would exploit it.

Sen dips a finger in the foul water and marks the current's pull on Ta's sketch. "The water wants to help," she whispers, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses.

In the lee of a towering rack of drying fish, their glassy eyes catching the slivers of distant light, the final piece of the rebellion is passed down. Old Nettie, the fingerless fixer, holds a stub of chalk. With a hand that does not shake, she draws on a warped plank: two quick taps, then a single, long drag. A simple, desperate glyph.

"Two-tap, one-drag," Old Nettie whispers, her voice like the wind over gravel. "It means 'way opens when the drum calls.' It's the sign of the ones they didn't drown."

Pei studies it, then replicates the mark perfectly on the rim of her drum with the same chalk. Lizi, trying to be useful, scrawls it crookedly on a nearby post. Yotaka watches, his princely mind memorizing the crude symbol that means more than any royal seal here. This mark, chalked on doors and posts, will be the signal. When the drum sounds and the sluice gate fails, these marks will become torches, opened doors, and raised knives.

Under the low, reeking canopy of a tannery shed, the leaders of this madness convene. The air is thick with the smell of curing hides and impending violence.

"Tide turns in three hours," Shan Xi states, drawing a line in the sawdust on the ground. "We move then."

Puripal, his silks looking absurdly out of place, nods. "The street mood is a bowstring. The whip-cracks are tightening it. It will not take much to snap."

Temej signs with his hands, a hunter's language. Eagle sees patrols concentrating at the granary. The western approach is thin.

Dukar points to the crude sluice-gate sketch. "The gate has a rotten tooth. We can pull it with minimal noise."

As they speak, Yotaka moves through the group, a silent specter with a kettle of water. He pours for Shan Xi, for Temej, for Dukar. Each adult acknowledges him with a slight nod, a touched shoulder, a murmured thanks.

The planning is done. The group begins to disperse back into the alleys. As they pass a small, dilapidated shrine to a forgotten sea god, one of the younger Seop-born pirates, a girl named Rin, begins to shake uncontrollably, overwhelmed by the echoes of the drill yard. She whimpers, a low, lost sound.

Acting on an impulse deeper than memory, Yotaka moves to her side. He leans close and begins to hum, soft and low, a fragment of a melody. It is his mother's lullaby, the one she sang only in the deepest privacy of the royal apartments, a tune of gentle waves and steadfast stars, a secret known only to a handful of people in the world.

A grime-faced urchin, a girl of no more than six with eyes too big for her face, who has been watching them from a heap of rags, freezes. Her filth-streaked face goes slack with shock. Her eyes, wide as moons, lock onto Yotaka. As the haunting melody hangs in the foul air, her chapped lips part. Her own mother, who was a maid for the Emperor's consort and has been executed the same day as her mistress, had heard this melody so many times that she lulled her own child with it. This child mouths the next line of the lullaby—perfectly.

For a heartbeat that lasts an eternity, the world holds its breath. Then, the urchin spins on her bare heels, her small body coiling like a spring. She bolts, a dart of desperate motion, her bare feet making no sound on the filthy stones as she arrows straight toward the well-lit militia post at the alley's end.

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