POV: wax
Summary
Wax watches the dense southern country roll past the train window — villages and towns and even small cities so frequent they barely break the orchards apart — and feels a small embarrassment at how easy it had become to assume nothing of importance happens outside Elendel. He opens the package Ranette had sent him before the train. In a fitted case: three of her improved hook spheres with cord, and a hand-cannon of a double-barrelled shotgun loaded with experimentally enormous shells, intended for stopping Thugs or full-blooded koloss. Her note warns him he will need to weight himself to fire the thing and the recoil should be *exceptional*.
The train slows into a station. The platform is crowded, but only a handful of passengers board; the rest are protesters, raising signs and pelting the car with eggs. Wax reads one sign as the train pulls out: *end Elendel oppression*. He turns to Steris for an explanation and gets, after some prying, a fluent education in outer cities grievance — that the rail and river network all funnels through Elendel so that goods crossing the Basin are taxed twice; that the outer cities have lobbied for years for direct lines that loop the Basin and been repeatedly denied; that the tariffs are the lever the capital uses to keep the Basin one country instead of a constellation of city-states. Wax is appalled to learn that he has, by his proxy on her vote, supported the tariffs twice and helped raise them once.
Steris is sitting opposite him in her travelling clothes, huddled into a blanket, head buried in a book whose title is hidden under a cloth dust-jacket. She tells him she is reading a *history of New Seran*. Her eyes are wide; she turns the pages too quickly. When she gets up to fetch a suitcase, Wax slides the book out and flips to her bookmark: it is an anatomy manual on human reproduction. She catches him red-handed. Groans into her hands. Confesses, after some recovery, that she has been trying to get a straight answer about the mechanics from her sister, her friends, even from a trio of prostitutes she invited for tea, and nobody will tell her anything; she has an heir to provide and a body that does not come with instructions.
He fumbles, then says the wrong thing — that they won't need to be *involved* with any real frequency, just a dozen or so occasions to do the job — and watches her wilt. He immediately apologises; he had not meant it to come out like a clause from a contract. They talk past the surface — past Lessie, past the contract, past Drewton — and around to something resembling honesty: he had been alone after Lessie died, and she had simply let him grieve, which was what he needed. He tells her plainly that what they make of their union does not have to be spelled out on the contract she wrote.
To explain himself he gets out one of Ranette's hook spheres and demonstrates: Pushes it onto the luggage rack, snaps the hooks, releases them again, and then — holding the cord taut — Pushes the sphere out at an angle so that it hangs against the line, swinging up like a kite. People, he tells Steris, are cords — always shooting out, always after what they have not yet found. Without boundaries they tangle. Law exists so that a thousand cords can move without strangling each other. That, he says, is why he is what he is.
Steris hands the sphere back and presses on: why then does he hate politics so much, when politics is all puzzle — what people's motives are, what they are lying about, what the truth is underneath? *House finances*, she insists, are the same. She is genuinely excited about her three-clip discrepancy. She drags a ledger over to the cocktail table between them and tells him to compare goods-received against payouts while she takes maintenance. Wax, who would dread this if she did not look so happy, sighs, sits back, and starts looking through the numbers.