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She looks up and nods.

“When do those bastards take the girls back to the mine?”

“In the morning,” she says. “Inspection don’t last that long. And they don’t fly when the satellites are overhead. They’ll keep…” Her lips quiver like salted slugs. “They keep the wives in the base until they pass. Be on ten usually.”

“Then you got till daybreak to make me look pretty enough to drop a drillboy’s jaw,” I say. “Can you do that? Gimme a little blush, curl this nest?”

She smiles. Finally this is something she knows.

“Little oil and an iron. I got one just behind the cupboard.”

“Good, Maeve. Good. And I’m gonna need a pair of pliers. Small as you got.”

BY MORNING, I’M SCHLEPPING over the frosted snow toward the base, trying not to limp for the pliers in my shoe. It’s bright and blue out and pretty enough for me to be pissed at the world for putting such a lovely face on such a shit-infested day.

The sea lolls against the coast like a dancing gray lover. It spits little bursts of salt that coast up in the air and then drizzle down on my shiny curled hair. Maeve might be all closed up to a world that’s beaten the hell out of whatever pretty dream she had for herself when she was freed from the mines. But she knows how to make an escapee from a genocide look like a dumb mine lass with rosy cheeks and flailing skirts and nothin’ to her knowin’ except how to coax fatass spiders into puking silk and how to get rustblood drillboys spitting seed enough to populate a township.

I stride down what counts as the main road for this whipped town, tucking my head like I’ve got something to hide. I got a bundle under my arm. It ain’t the orb. I left that buried in the cinders, and Ulysses with Maeve. All I got is a bucket of salted fish from Maeve’s pitiable larder and enough ankle showing for the Red Hand butcherboys smoking burners in front of the old base to forget about their morning snort of grayline. They make like bees to me. No manners. They’re conquerors. What they see is theirs. And they’re wondering how the Picker didn’t already take his wife tax of me.

They pester about, asking questions. I act all domestic and frazzled, careening about like I’m a drunk sparrow trying to find gaps in the trees. They pull my hands, to see if I’ve a ring on. They hem me in and coax me into a smoke. I take a burner between my lips as one rests his hand on my ass, cupping inside the cheek, nearly where the magazine of teeth are secured by epoxy to my deeper parts. I act timid, like I can’t resist the absolute magnetism of his hand halfway up my ass. The other boys get jealous, and the biggest shoulders the other aside.

“Never had a burner,” I say dozily to Biggest.

“We got ’em by the carton back at the fortress,” he brags. I try not to tongue my aching gums. A good part of my gray matter wants to melt his face right there, or maybe aim a little lower. Another part feels bad for the stupid bastard. He’s pimply, not even in his twenties. He thinks he’s something because he’s got a gun and big hands and big shoulders. But the dumb fuck’s never seen a Telemanus in wargear or the Sovereign sitting there with a cup of tea and the weight of ten billion on her. He’s never seen Victra standing there like a god giving life to a baby that’d change the world if he ever got the chance to grow. If the dumb bastard did have a notion of his true size, he’d crumple up and die for understanding how petrifyingly small he actually is.

&nb

sp; I know how small I am. But I also know how small they are.

The last part of my gray matter, the most important part, is occupied with the idea of melting the guts out of Harmony, sawing her head off, and feeding the rest of her to a fire. I’d have done it for Tiran alone, and maybe felt guilty. But then her stimmed-up rapists had to ruin my sister too. Had to butcher her children. Cut them with slingBlades like they were onions. Then they had to kill my pa when he couldn’t even walk. Then they had to nail a baby to a tree. I don’t give a piss if they’re human. If they got problems. If they got drugs in ’em. If they had hard lives. If they got reasons. All I know is one has his hand digging into my backside, and I’m smiling, bearing it because I know I’m gonna die. But I’m gonna take as many of them with me as I can, and maybe, just maybe, find out if my friends are still alive.

The big one leads me toward the old base. Takes me around the shoulders, whispering so close I can smell the morning eggs and tobacco on his breath. His fingers graze my right tit. His boys saunter behind, half ripe jealous, half puffed up by his conquest. He steers me past the louses at the door, and tries to pull me sidelong into some room where he’ll rape me first, and then share me like a half-done burner.

“Never been inside here!” I coo loudly in my best approximation of Maeve’s accent. “This is what it looks like! Sure there were Grays about once. Maybe Golds! Bellonas, weren’t they? I’ve always wanted to go to Olympia.”

“Never mind about Olympia,” he says. “It’s a crow shithole now. In here’s where the fun is.”

But the noise has perked the ears of bigger dogs, and before he can pull me into the room, one of the Picker’s boys comes around the corner. He’s a got a metal arm, kind eyes, and a beautiful head of rusty hair. “What you got there, Torrow?”

“Oh, just a friend,” big Torrow says, all meek-like. “None yours, Duncan.”

“You know the fish are under Harmony’s hand,” the handsome man says. He sips his coffee and those bright eyes of his look me over. He seems in his mid-twenties. Cocky, but a kindness to him.

“Picker already got the tax,” my idiot says, tilting me away protectively. “This one’s an old maid. Prolly already got a canyon from three, four?”

“You had little ones, miss?” Duncan asks me polite-like.

“Not a one,” I say.

“Husband?”

“Gone and died,” I say.

“Clan you?”

“Beta.”

“Omicron here.” He squints at me and smiles awkwardly. “How many years?”