The captives had all been ordered to sit in a row at the back of the boat, with Leo and Horn in the centre, and Linua and Eret on the outside, cut off from each other. The acolyte called Ceci stood over them and now that they were further away from the harbour with no-one close by to see she had her pistol out, pointing down. At least one of the other acolytes would probably have a gun too. Linua had to make that assumption.

Tuwa Shone was going to kill them. Linua had no idea what he planned for her, but it would probably involve a ritual sigil being burned into her palm hard enough to electrocute her. Once Linua was dead he would have no more use for Eret. Eret would then be killed too, and Tuwa Shone would do what he said before, stage something so that it looked like Leo had killed Horn or Horn had killed Leo. Neither of them would survive that.

Strangely, the thought cleared Linua’s head. If they were going to die anyway, then she didn’t need to co-operate by keeping her head down and hoping to survive. She just needed one small chance and she would take it. The problem was the acolytes with guns. It would be no good freeing herself if she just got Eret shot.

She rolled to her side and said quickly, in Horn’s ear, “You can break out of the zip ties if you cup your hands together and pull them back and hit your chest really hard with your wrists. Pass that on to Bead—I mean, Leo…”

The acolyte raised her gun and stepped forward.

“No talking!” she shouted. She pointed the gun at Eret again. “Another word out of your mouth and he dies.”

Linua shut up.

The boat left the bay and headed out to open sea. The sun was low in the sky, to the right, which meant they were heading south. There were other vessels out there, most heading for the harbour, but all were too far away to make out what was happening on the Reel Lady.

The swell grew, and the boat began to bounce from wave to wave. Ceci kept her balance easily, which indicated either wushu training or experience with boats. She had got tired of pointing the gun vaguely in their direction and it hung beside her thigh now.

Behind her, Tuwa Shone stood with his feet apart, also keeping his balance easily. But if he regularly threw his victims off boats he would be experienced at sea too.

Linua wondered why the acolytes followed Tuwa Shone. What had he done to them, or promised them, to get this kind of loyalty?

Tuwa Shone wasn’t charming, for all his smiles and affected mannerisms—he was too fake for that—but he had a sort of aura, a presence that drew the eye, which was clearly born of wealth and confidence. But rich people—genuinely rich people, like, for example, the entire Yi family—didn’t project that kind of aura. They just simply were. They were so used to being rich and powerful that they didn’t bother announcing it or thinking about it at all. Tuwa Shone had the aura of someone who was confident because he had become rich and powerful. He was too conscious of it.

Linua remembered how Leo—when she and Eret had first interviewed him—had referred to Tuwa Shone as hungry. Horn had caused him plausible. She could see now that they had both been right.

She didn’t spend too much time looking at Tuwa Shone, though. Instead, she focused on the acolytes. They were the ones she would need to overcome in order to free everyone. She had to try to work out which of them were armed with guns, aside from Ceci.

There were the three female acolytes—Ceci, Jaiya and Nancine—and two male acolytes. One of the boys had carried a small chest the entire time, so she mentally dubbed him BoxBoy. The other was the oldest and tallest. He had never taken his hand out of his pocket, and he wore the same sort of loose-fitting top as Ceci, with a big square pocket affixed to the front. He was the most likely candidate for a second gun. She decided to think of him as GunBoy.

Eventually, after they had been travelling for perhaps an hour, Tuwa Shone come to stand beside Ceci.

“How nicely cowed they look,” he said with amusement. “Well done, my child.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Master? Ugh. To Linua’s surprise Tuwa Shone sat down cross-legged on the deck, right in front of them, hitching his suit trousers over his knees to adapt the fall of the cloth to his posture. He looked spectacularly unprepared for a boat trip. He probably hadn’t expected to be able to kidnap Linua right out of Leo’s boathouse. Why did he want her, specifically?

“Tonight is simply full of opportunities,” Tuwa Shone declared. “I don’t often get the chance to explain myself fully, like this. Are you ready for a story, my children? Something to while the hours away.”

That meant they were going to be travelling for hours. How far was Tuwa Shone planning to take them? Linua had no idea how fast boats travelled in actual miles per hour, so the length of the journey didn’t really help her, other than to indicate it was some distance.

“I don’t understand,” Horn said, finally bold enough to voice his thoughts. “What on Inanna do you think you are doing?”

“He’s the unsub,” Linua said, momentarily forgetting she wasn’t supposed to speak. But Ceci’s authority had been superseded by that of Tuwa Shone, and she didn’t react, so Linua added, “He killed Kala. And lots of other people.”

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“You could have pretended not to know,” Leo snapped at Linua. “Now he knows that you know.”

What good would that have done? Tuwa Shone was going to kill them anyway. Didn’t Leo realise that, or did he still think he could get Tuwa Shone to release everyone? Tuwa Shone laughed at Linua’s annoyed expression.

“My dear Leo—always so hopelessly naïve and well-intentioned.”

“I am not your dear godsdamn Leo, you sadistic prick.”

Tuwa Shone ignored this.

“It doesn’t matter how much you already know, I’m going to tell you everything anyway.”

He was just like a villain in a melodrama, Linua thought incredulously. He wouldn’t have been out of place in a Keng Boh Kids adventure. Linua studied the acolytes, keeping half an ear out for what Tuwa Shone had to say.

“Tell me who Deen Tuwa was,” Tuwa Shone said.

It was obviously one of those trick questions. Everyone knew who Deen Tuwa was—children learned that before they even learned to read. Tuwa Shone was doing that annoying thing adults did when they wanted you to give the obvious answer just so they could tell you that you were wrong.

Horn obliged by giving the obvious answer. He said, “She was the Betrayer, the daughter of one of the Guardians, whose followers sabotaged the Ḫūlušarri.”

He was referring to the mothership in which the original colonists had arrived. They hadn’t set out expecting to be colonists—the Ḫūlušarri was a cruise ship, which had been on a tour of various local stellar phenomena when it had been damaged, forcing the everyone aboard to abandon ship and take the lifeboats to Inanna.

Horn’s voice was nervous. He sounded like he was trying to appease a dragon. Out of the corner of her eye, Linua could see that Tuwa Shone was hugely delighted by this reaction.

“In her righteous fight against the tyranny of Lord Nimras,” Tuwa Shone explained, “Deen Tuwa gathered together all her most powerful weapons and sealed them under the aegis of a guardian, hidden deep within a secret base, to be accessed only by those worthy of the honour of her banner.”

In other words, crazy cultists. No-one except weirdos like Tuwa Shone’s acolytes could possibly think that Deen Tuwa was a good person, or that her fight against Lord Nimras was in any way justified. Deen Tuwa’s followers had sabotaged the ship, causing untold grief for the passengers of the Ḫūlušarri. Most surviving Ancient Kāruan art was the lament for the lost homeworld the passengers would never see again.

What Tuwa Shone was after was, effectively, a weapons cache.

Linua realised something else.

“It’s a key,” she said. “The artefact is a key.”

Tuwa Shone’s eyebrows rose.

“Clever girl!”

Linua hated the way he had of dealing out compliments as if you were a dog who had just demonstrated a new obedience trick. But that’s how he probably spoke to his acolytes, as a way of keeping them in their place.

“We were so excited, Kala and I, when we realised what it must be,” Tuwa Shone mused. “Credit where it was due, Kala was the one who discovered it. She had this little obsession, you see, that Deen Tuwa was a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy. She could be a frightful bore about it once she got going, but she had a whole folder full of her research on Deen Tuwa.” Tuwa Shone smiled widely. “I had no idea how much it would come in useful in later years. Anyway, we borrowed a boat from my dad and set off to the island.” He tapped a thoughtful finger against his lip. “What we didn’t realise was that the lock has a genetic component. Only the person with the right kind of heritage can open it.”

The bottom fell out of Linua’s stomach as she realised what he was saying. The burn mark on the victims’ hands, the fact that they had died of electrocution—it wasn’t due to some kind of cultist ritual. It was Deen Tuwa’s secret base defending itself. Kala hadn’t been deliberately killed by Tuwa Shone in cultist ritual. She’d been killed when she’d tried to open the door with the key.

Linua hadn’t ever studied biology or genetics, but she rather thought that, after nearly three thousand years, it was highly unlikely that anyone alive had the right DNA unlock a secret Ancient Kāruan base coded to Deen Tuwa.

Then Linua realised something else.

Deen Tuwa had been born of a Guardian father and a Keretu slave. She had been half Shang nobility and half Keretu. Just like Linua.

Tuwa Shone thought Linua was the person who would be able to open the door to the base.

Her skin felt slick and cold with sweat, even though any moisture was constantly wicked away by the sea breeze. She was unable to prevent a full body shiver and Tuwa Shone smiled wide as he saw it.

“Ah, you’ve worked it out. Such a clever child!”

“What…?” Horn asked. “What are you planning?”

Horn didn’t know about the bodies, born away from the island by the current, and deposited on beaches all along the coast of Panathelo. So many bodies. Parts of bodies. Linua shuddered again. Tuwa Shone must have kept trying with victim after victim. Had they all been dragged, helpless and unwilling, like Linua, or had they gone proudly, tricked by Tuwa Shone into thinking that they were some kind of chosen one?

Tuwa Shone focused on Leo.

“Neither you nor Horn will survive this, I’m afraid. You know too much, and Horn had the poor luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I know you are concerned for the two children. So, if you’re good, and do everything I say, I won’t dispose of them. Instead, I will let them join my organisation. They won’t be free, but they won’t be dead either. That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

He sounded cajoling, as if encouraging a recalcitrant toddler to eat something healthy. He was also lying. Leo knew that, didn’t he?

Tuwa Shone’s eyes fell thoughtfully on Linua now. He snapped his fingers and one of his acolytes stepped instantly up to his side.

“Take her into the cabin.” He meant the small cabin affixed to the front of the boat, where the ship’s wheel and the rest of the controls were. It was a small box, barely big enough for two or three people.

Why did he want to separate Linua from the others? She couldn’t think of any good reason, and found herself shivering with disgust when Jaiya and Nancine picked her up by her arms and hauled her to the front of the boat. They set her down just inside the door of the cabin, and she tried to twist so she could look at Eret, to see how he was doing. She caught a quick glimpse of him, looking back at her with horror, his legs flexing as if to push himself up. Leo was leaning slightly towards him, his mouth shaping words. He looked like he was talking Eret down.

At least Eret looked like he wasn’t frozen anymore. Leo would take care of him.

Then Linua was dumped roughly on the ground, where the cabin wall prevented her from seeing Horn, Leo or Eret. Tuwa Shone stood over her, then crouched down before her, hitching his trousers again to prevent the hems coming into contact with the wet, briny floor.

“I can see you’ve worked it out,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’re not going to die. You’re so perfect! Do you know how difficult it would be otherwise, to get hold of a princess of the Houses, much less one that is half-Keretu?”

Linua didn’t say anything, just shivered against the wall of the cabin. Tuwa Shone seemed disappointed by her lack of response.

“You’ll see when we get there,” he murmured. “We’ve a way to go yet.”

Thankfully, after that, he left her alone.