Markus didn’t win both laurels in the next Renathion. He placed in the pentathlon—Cades didn’t hold back this time, which seemed to make them both happy—but in the massage competition the Jeneretes judge hit him with some kind of double bind on an obscure topic and we couldn’t get a nuanced answer to him in time. It was a targeted strike. We weren’t sure why the Jeneretti turned on us, but it was definitely political. Alceoi had deliberately avoided me, which was probably a good indicator of which way the wind was blowing.

Her expression betrayed nothing when she saw me, but she couldn’t hide her surprise from my comm. At least she wasn’t being blackmailed, I guess.

It was nine thessim until the Kabidiad, which meant eight opportunities left to qualify—seven, if we traveled by caravan to preserve his cover. We sat down with the girls to strategize about the situation, and decided to try branching out for a competition or two. Kuril hired a local musician to teach Markus some traditional songs. He picked them up easily enough, but his execution was terrible. We’d have to stick with massage for the next Renathion at least.

“They’re way too nasal over here,” he told me. “It doesn’t help that my imported muscle memory is all for soprano.”

“You used to be a girl?” I asked.

“I learned to sing female.” He patted me on the back. “I know you’ve had a lot of culture shock. It’ll get easier. I went through it too.”

“Honestly, no, that’s not the problem,” I said. “I just can’t imagine you without all the muscles.”

“Oh no, the muscles were there,” Abby laughed.

Fortunately for us, the Estheni musical tradition valued expression within a certain set of technical constraints, so if Markus could hit a minimum level of competence, we could close the gap with ethertech and pretend the rest were artistic flourishes. Val was cooking something up for that. It was tempting to see all this as unfair, and thus invalidating the hit on Kabiades—a couple weeks of training shouldn’t put Markus on even footing with people who’d been doing this their whole lives—but it actually wasn’t. I would know: I bugged Val until he walked me through the math.

“Fine,” he said. “Why do you think cheating is unfair?”

“Uh, it’s unfair by definition?”

“Almost. Fairness is a kind of justice. That’s a simple permutation of the wave function. Cheating is unfair because it’s unjust. And it’s unjust because a fair competition is one in which contestants restrict themselves to a set of allowed actions while attempting to win.”

“Right,” I said. “So, Markus can’t compete justly because he’s got this advantage that the rules proscribe.”

“They don’t, as it happens,” Val said. “The only precedent for competing with an etheric advantage are demigods, and the rules explicitly allow them to compete. But that would be arguing a technicality; you can infer noetically it’s not enough to make it fair.”

“Honestly, no,” I said. “If I’m up against a demigod, I’m taking any advantage I can get.”

Val paused.

“Because if you did not?”

I grimaced. “It… would be unfair.”

“Which is the point,” he said. “You would compete fairly against the demigod, and unfairly against everyone else. And in practice that sort of competence discrepancy exists across multiple dimensions for every competitor. We can therefore posit a sort of background noise of unfairness, which does not meaningfully affect the fairness of the competition until a particularly meaningful intervention causes it to pass a threshold of significance.”

“Aw crap, did I mess it up when I shut up that one judge?”

“Possibly. It was, in fact, an intervention by a third party. But you can’t say the rest of the audience was avoiding intervention either.”

“Yeah, that was bullshit.”

“Markus was injured, and much of that competition involved cultural knowledge he, through no fault of his own, did not possess. So mathematically he was actually at a disadvantage. So once we’ve demonstrated that, we execute a scope shift with Arnje’s Equation.”

I blinked. Arnje’s Equation was the mathematical proof that godslaying was just.

“Wait just a fucking second—”

“I will not,” Val said fondly. “You guessed correctly. Markus has to win to accomplish the ultimate goal of slaying Kabiades, which is just. We’ve already translated the cheating equation to justice. All that’s left is to combine the two. Therefore, anything we do to ensure that Markus is competitive is just.”

“Even, like, shooting everyone?” I said. “Or disappearing them, like Lirian’s doing?”

“I said competitive. Removing the other competitors would invalidate the competition. Lirian’s campaign is doing the same for whoever her chosen candidate is, but maintaining the competitiveness of the Renathion is presumably not one of her objectives. In fact, it’s possible this represents Meris moving against Kabiades. Either way, as long as she’s against Markus, we can just tally it with the rest of his disadvantages.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

He walked me through them. I pointed out that Val hadn’t included the part where Markus hadn’t trained as much as the other athletes, but Val countered that they’d had much more opportunity to train than Markus. After adjusting for confounders, Markus actually came out ahead on diligence. Which brought us back to cheating just enough to make things fair.

I love my job.

We got back to our respective jobs—mine a repetitive scribing task Kuril had assigned to me, Val’s the endless work of updating the etheric profiles of the pantheon—before I had another question.

“Hey Val,” I said. “I just realized I never looked into sports competitions on Veles. Do they, like, measure fairness before games?”

Val chuckled. “Why would we do something like that?”

*

For my part, I was expecting the lifestyle of minor nobility to include more leisure time. I didn’t get it. Alongside Markus’s music coach, Kuril had discreetly hired an etiquette tutor for me. I knew she was probably right to do so, and Isseret was a goldmine for our sociological archives, but the sessions were, like, an hour long. It’s not really the same feeling as when you’re undercover and just trying specific things to figure out how the culture works. By the end of the first thessim I came to dread her lessons.

I’d unwittingly revealed that I knew what torque was, so the sisters started dragging me into the workshop with them. “Workshop” was a misleading term for multiple project-laden rooms and an entire covered section of the estate’s central courtyard. That was another source of stress, for reasons I really should have anticipated.

“Check this over for me,” said Roel, shoving a starched folder on top of the pile. I was at the desk they’d had someone shove into the corner of the main construction room, which was a cluttered space that felt half its size due to all the shelving covering the walls and the display platform occupying most of the floor. I had to squeeze past a shelf just to get behind it and sitting down was an athletic challenge of a level I’d not experienced since the Academy. Within an hour I’d lost a third of its surface area to various tools, trappings, and two plates of wraps the staff had brought in for Roel and I while we worked. Roel’s was untouched.

I’d not been initiated into the Sisterhood of the Wheel—the cult the Vitares sisters belonged to, one of many under Androdaima—so I wasn’t allowed to actually help. Instead, they just had me learning the workings of the workshop while I copied paperwork for Kuril. But I’d revealed I could read equations, so Roel was skirting the limits of what was allowed and having me double-check her math.

“Newton save my illiterate ass,” I whimpered as Roel stared expectantly.

“I’m available if Newton isn’t,” said Val.

“I’ll take it.”

“Anything?” asked Roel. “I’m not sure about the last page. It feels like the spring should put out more force.”

“The spring,” I said blandly, spreading out the pages on my desk.

“Right, this bit here.” Roel pointed at a part of the page I definitely would have picked out without her help.

I inwardly rejoiced that Roel was so thorough. In high school I’d lost so many points for not showing my work. Roel wouldn’t have had that problem.

“The lines over those numbers might indicate negative quantities,” said Val.

Grateful to run into familiar ground, I gave it a shot. “Maybe you have a sign error somewhere?”

“Sign error?” said Roel, brow furrowing.

Oh shit oh shit. “Yeah,” I said, trying outwardly to remain calm. “You know, where you’ve got a negative number but you forget to put the little negative line on top.”

“Oh,” said Roel. Her expression relaxed into recognition. “That’s a funny phrase for it. I know what you’re talking about. Let me take another look.”

She snatched up the papers and started poring over them.

“Thank Darwin,” I breathed.

“You know she’s only doing this because she wants to impress you, right?” asked Markus.

“That’s fine, right?” I subvocalized. “That’s what we want.”

“It means she’s handing those equations right back to you when she’s done.”

“Vaaaaaaaal! Help!”

Val continued to be my lifeline during those stints, and Abby told me later he was spending his free time trying to derive paraphysics equations with Therian numerals. What a nerd.

Masquerading as a literate engineer with legitimate expertise had one benefit: I learned a lot about the Vitares family business. They were an old family—their great-great-great-grandmother had literally founded the city—but they were constantly investing their wealth into new projects.

Only one of each, though. I grew up in a post-industrial service economy before emigrating to a culture I’d taken to describing as “fully automatic luxury space capitalism,” so I found the whole thing kind of weird and inefficient. I didn’t dare ask them about it. If I accidentally nudged them into inventing mass production, the commander might just shoot me.

Just when I was starting to get a handle on the math, I asked one too many intelligent questions about how the business side of things functioned. Kuril evidently decided I was smart enough to contribute and started making those little indirect offers to hire me as her secretary in her meetings. I’d managed to deflect so far by playing dumb, but Kuril had taken that as evidence that I needed further social refinement and scheduled more sessions with Isseret.

I could only dodge this so long before it got awkward—well, more awkward—so I was going to have to learn to read. The obvious move was to admit I was illiterate and ask them to hire another tutor, but I’d already bonded with Roel over reading, so that course of action would raise all sorts of inconvenient questions. I was reduced to sneaking into the house library after bedtime, cloak on, and streaming the contents of random books back to the ship. Between that and Kuril’s paperwork, we had a good evidence base to work on. Abby took point on that, but it wasn’t a fast process—especially considering none of us actually spoke Estheni. Our short-term plan was to try to get literacy tutoring for Markus and have me etherically piggyback on his feed, but there was still so much we didn’t know about Therian social norms and we couldn’t risk offending our hosts. I hadn’t made the request yet.

We were looking into finding a tutor on our own, but that route had a different problem—fucking Lirian.

She was following us. She never got close enough to the Vitares estate to trip the MDOs there, but we were all carrying shorter-ranged personal models. Whenever one of us left the estate grounds, we’d get little feather touches right at the outer range of the device. Subtle enough that maybe you could mistake it for sensor noise, but our standard protocol now was to check in by thinking her name over the comm network. Apparently her bullshit extended to feeling out the range of our detection network, but she hadn’t figured out that her antimemetic effect was giving us that information anyways.

“Or that’s what she wants us to think,” Markus had said.

“Don’t say that!” I’d yelled.

Of course, per The Road of Spears, any pattern of behavior is exploitable, faked or not. If she kept this up, we could finish her off. We knew so little about who her allies were or what her goals were. Our only lead was what I’d heard from Sela Kess at the ball.

So, after Markus failed to get laurels in passion at the third Renathion, we had him ask Cades out for drinks.