Grandmother had been incensed to discover that the Yi family still expected Linua to attend Castle Yi in the mornings. This was not to attend the training session with the rest of the cousins, as the bruises over her ribs still needed to heal, but because the Yi family considered Castle Yi to be conducive to recuperating. Linua thought that Grandmother had probably expected to book extra tutor sessions instead, so on balance she was relieved.

The humiliating apology had occurred yesterday evening. Linua had said sorry for being rude, and Grandmother had graciously agreed to take her shopping the next day. She had even said that Anith could come.

It meant that Linua had won. Now all she needed to do was get Grandmother to agree that she could go back to the Observatory.

In the meantime, when she arrived at Castle Yi, she realised she was expected to do nothing more than simply go and sit in the gardens and relax.

Linua’s favourite was the bamboo garden, which consisted of a myriad of narrow winding paths through tall, green stands of bamboo. When there was a breeze, the bamboo stalks rattled gently together, sounding a little like falling rain against a backdrop of wind in the leaves. The paths twisted in all different directions and frequently turned back on themselves, but if you followed the right one it would take you to a tiny clearing at the summit of a small hill, where there was a diminutive statue of a fox with a smug, secretive expression.

It was a good place to curl up and finish her Keng Boh Kids novel, until it was time for the car to take her back home.

Linua crossed the entrance hall on her way out, and saw Sayo Hui sitting on the steps with her chin in her hands. The first thing she noticed was Sayo Hui’s outfit. Linua had mostly only seen Sayo Hui either in a white gi or traditional Shang clothing on Nimrasday. Today, Sayo Hui was wearing black leggings that laced all the way up the sides, and a long-sleeved black top with no shoulders, just a thick strip of material passing from her left breast and over her right shoulder.

She looked like a film director’s ideal of a female assassin.

The second thing Linua noticed was Sayo Hui’s face. Her expression was closed off and unhappy. Linua hesitated, wondering whether it would be interfering to ask what was wrong. Then she remembered how Sayo Hui had come to sit next to her the previous week, after she had been sent out of the dojo.

“Hi,” she said, uncertainly.

Sayo Hui looked up. Her face wasn’t welcoming. Linua nearly turned tail then, but she made herself go over and sit next to Sayo Hui, the way Sayo Hui had for her.

“I hear you had an adventure on Fivesday,” Sayo Hui said. Her voice sounded slightly thick and croaky, as if she had been crying.

“Yeah.” Linua hadn’t come over to talk about that. “Are you okay?”

“Me?” Sayo Hui asked, surprised. She blinked and looked away. “Oh. Yeah, me? I’m fine.”

That was clearly a lie. Linua remembered DC Sipps’s extremely annoying habit of sitting silently and waiting it out. It made you want to fill the silence. She waited.

“Just, you know.” Sayo Hui took a deep breath. “Decisions to make, that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” said Linua.

“I know we talked the other day about how we didn’t want to ascend.” Sayo Dahn picked at an invisible loose thread on the knee of her leggings. “But what is it you actually want out of life?”

It was Linua’s turn to blink. She hadn’t expected that.

“Will you stay with the family or do what your dad did?” Her voice sounded more normal now, as if she had got control of herself.

“I want to study archaeology,” Linua said.

“Archaeology, huh?” Sayo Hui rubbed her nose. “I thought your mother’s family wanted you to study the stars.”

“They do.”

“You told them you want to study archaeology instead?”

“Not yet.”

Sayo Hui gave a sharp bark of laughter and gave Linua’s shoulder a friendly push.

“You and I both, little sister.”

Linua digested that.

“What haven’t you told them?”

Sayo Hui made a face.

“Don’t want to ascend. Don’t want to be a Yi operative and go on stupid missions. Don’t want to do the tournament either.”

All the Guardian Houses came together annually so that their best champions could compete in a martial arts tournament. It had attained an almost mythical status to the rest of the world, but Linua had overheard a couple of the uncles talking about it once, and they hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic about it. One of them had referred to it disparagingly as a form of ritualised bragging.

“I like spending money as much as the next person, but I don’t want to go into the business. I wouldn’t be any good at it.” Sayo Hui shrugged. “That pretty much leaves me with one option, and I don’t want that.”

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“What do you mean?”

“Eh, never mind.” Sayo Hui gave her a side glance, clearly looking for another topic of conversation, and noticed her clothes. “What the hell are you wearing?”

“You sound like Grandmother.”

“Hah! No, but seriously. Who picked those clothes for you?”

“These are nice clothes! I borrowed them from a friend.”

“Since when does a Yi need to borrow clothes?”

“I grew out of my other ones. Grandmother is taking me clothes shopping tomorrow afternoon.”

“Really? You need any advice on what to buy, Little Sister, you let me know.”

Sayo Hui’s outfit was actually pretty supe.

“Would you like to come?” Linua asked impulsively.

Sayo Hui raised her eyebrows.

“Well,” she said, “I never turn down an invitation to go shopping.”

Since no-one had yet worked out that Linua had been using the ground-floor toilet window to escape, she decided to keep trying it. She had made plans with Eret via bulletin board the previous evening, and she intended to keep them. This would only be a very short outing, an hour at most, and even if she was caught she could always pretend she had wanted to go out for a walk.

There were two Yi operatives protecting the property at all times, but Linua reasoned that they would be busy keeping intruders out, not attempting to keep her in.

She’d watched their patrolling patterns, which gave her a one-minute window of opportunity to get out of the house and disappear into the treeline. Then she could creep through the forest to the road and walk to the village, where she’d agreed to meet Eret.

Once the whole intruder business was over, she would have to start cultivating a habit of going out for walks on a regular basis. Or maybe cycle rides, if she bought Solly’s bicycle.

Eret was sitting by the roadside. He stood up as she came to meet him, and her stomach was full of butterflies. He held out his hand and she put hers in it, then he gave her a quick hello kiss on the lips.

“I think we need to practice more,” he said, as he raised his head.

Linua laughed.

“There’s a viewpoint with a picnic bench,” she pointed out. “We can go and sit there.”

At this time of day it was empty of tourists and visitors, giving them a view of the bay of Herkow and the wide expanse of sea stretching all the way to the horizon, sparkling with tiny flashes wherever a wave caught the sinking sun.

“I need to tell you about what the journalist wanted,” Linua said, as they sat down.

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. It’s okay.”

“Well, if we’re going to … if you’re going to …” If Eret was going to be her boyfriend then he needed to know. She took a deep breath. “Do you know who Atria Leylan and Yi Tai Geng are?”

“Of course I know,” Eret replied. “Everyone knows who they are. They were two members of the expedition sent to retrieve the Erešu Zakiti. They’re, like, two of the most famous people on the planet.”

This was a slight exaggeration, but not by much.

The Erešu Zakiti was one of original lifeboats that had fled the foundering mothership three thousand years ago. Forty-nine of the mothership’s fifty lifeboats had made it to the nearest habitable planet, which Lord Nimras had named Inanna. One lifeboat, however, the Erešu Zakiti, had been lost. Linua’s grandmother was the one who had identified it in a decaying orbit around the planet Marduk.

“I suppose I should say they are two members of the expedition, since they’re technically still alive,” Eret added.

The aim of the expedition had been to investigate the damage the Erešu Zakiti had sustained and stabilise her orbit. Following that, the expedition members had been tasked with evaluating the possibility of restarting her engines and bringing her back to Inanna. The length of the trip had been projected to be two years—a round trip of eighteen months, plus six months to analyse the Erešu Zakiti itself.

What the expedition had not expected was a ship full of nearly a thousand original colonists preserved in cryogenic suspension, who were protected by active war machines. Over half the members of the Inanna expedition had been killed, and their ship had been irretrievably damaged.

The only option the survivors had left was to attempt to restart the Erešu Zakiti’s engines and return that way. In this, they succeeded, but had missed their launch window, the next one not being for another twenty years. The expedition had only been supplied with enough food and supplies for a two-year trip—even though they had lost more than half their number, there still would not have been enough food to last them until the next launch window.

Instead, the remaining expedition members had risked going into the spare cryogenic pods until the next launch window was available, which included Atria Leylan and Yi Tai Geng.

“Wait…” Eret said. “Leylan? Are you…?”

“They’re my parents,” Linua said.

Eret opened his mouth, but no words came out. He sat there, visibly processing.

“I thought you said they died.”

“I said they were gone. When I say that everyone always thinks I mean they’re dead.” She stared down at her lap. “It’s easier than explaining what really happened.”

“Gods.” Eret leaned back on the bench and stared at the sky. “That’s a … I can’t even imagine.” He let out a breath. “How old will you be when they get back?”

If they got back.

“I’ll be twenty-nine.”

Eret swore then gave her a guilty look.

“Sorry! But, I mean … that’s really tough.”

“Yeah.”

“Er, how old will they be when they get back?”

“In their late thirties.”

“Wow. That’s really messed up.”

“Yeah.”

Eret glanced at her again, then slid his arm around her and pulled her against his side. She gave a squeak of surprise, but then relaxed into his arms.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said simply.

The conversation moved on to the intruder, the Yi bodyguards, the missing artefact, and the now missing Bead, although with no new information all they were doing was rehashing new ground. The time passed quickly—too quickly—and it seemed only shortly after they had first sat down that Eret was giving her a lift on the moped back to house. He stopped several hundred yards down the drive so that the Yi bodyguards wouldn’t catch sight of him.

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” Linua said reluctantly, as she dismounted.

“Oh?” He quirked his brows up at her. “More secrets?”

“Not exactly. I had to tell DC Sipps about our visit to Bead’s Boats, and the fact that you and I met up. Zhong Ren was listening in, and afterwards he said…”

Eret made a face.

“That I wasn’t to darken your door again?”

“Um … you’re supposed to ask Grandmother Leylan and Great-Grandfather Yi for permission to… uh.” She refused to use words like ‘court’ in everyday conversation.

Eret visibly recoiled, his expression daunted.

“Does he think we’re still living in Imperial times?”

It was the Yi family. They thought they were still living in Ancient Kāru, and would have been quite happy to wake up one day and find that the Deluge, the Post-Deluge period, the Kingdom of Kāru, the Glorious Sun Empire, and all subsequent periods of history had never happened.

“I’d like it if we could meet up again,” Eret said, after a moment.

Linua wasn’t sure if that meant he was saying he liked her so much he was willing to go out with her irrespective of whether two of the most intimidating people in Herkow approved or not, or if he had simply blanked everything she had just said so that he didn’t have to think about it. Either way, she wasn’t going to press the point. Her family was just a never-ending source of deep embarrassment.