(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

At her cabin worktable, prying the stiff wax-paper cap off a flare canister, Tress is half thinking about other things — how visibly Fort enjoyed haggling the night before, when market bargaining has always made her uncomfortable; how Ann at the cannon was more lit up by an unfired shot than Charlie had ever been even by a freshly baked pie. Taking apart a spore-loaded flare while distracted is, the narrator allows, not the best of ideas; but she had not chosen to be distracted.

Huck is at her elbow, hidden under an overturned soup bowl, lifting one rim an inch to peek out. He is afraid of the spores in front of her, but she has noticed that he has been hiding more even when the cat is nowhere about. As a small pink stone sphere rolls out of the flare's heart he asks what it is. The water charge, she explains — holding it to the porthole so light catches the roseite and a shadow of liquid sloshes inside. The break of this sphere is what ignites the sunlight spores packed around it: a flare burns bright and hot rather than exploding, though it can still burn. To demonstrate the alternative she thumps a cannonball onto the table beside the parts. One of those, she tells him, is full of zephyr — and that does explode, right good. Huck lowers his bowl another inch.

While she rolls the little water pearl back and forth she remembers the Moonday services on top of the Rock, where twice a year a true eclipse let the congregation watch the sun line up exactly behind the Verdant Moon. Visiting preachers used the occasion to speak about the purpose of life, on which no two of them ever quite agreed — even two from the same moonschool diverged. That used to comfort her: if professionals could not get the answer to line up, she could be forgiven for being a mess. Now, fishing the timer out of the gutted flare, she wonders. Each preacher had behaved as if there were a single answer. For Fort the purpose of life is the right trade; for Ann it is to fire a cannon without removing the limbs of her friends by accident. Are there many answers, or are they all the same answer with different applications? She would have made an excellent philosopher, the narrator observes, in that she has already worked out that philosophy is not as valuable as she had assumed — usually a thirty-year process.

She pries out the timer and sets it on the table. The flare gun, she notes, works in essence like an ordinary pistol — a separate firing charge propels the flare. Then she shows Huck the actual plan. She pries the small silver tip — a tiny pencil-point cone — off the timer. This is what makes the flare go off: it punches the roseite water bead and releases the water onto the spores. She is going to reverse it. The silver tip goes under the cap, point facing into the flare; when the flare strikes something the tip will be driven backward into the roseite core, the water will burst out, and the charge will fire. Huck thinks the engineering sounds right but wants to know why. She tells him. She has consulted Ulaam earlier in the day: the spores in Crow's blood will turn aside anything that tries to break her skin, so a normal pistol would not hurt her — they had seen as much when Crow took her shots against the merchant. *So you'll stop her instead of hurting her*, Huck guesses. Exactly. She is going to rebuild the flare without sunlight spores — sand and a few grains of verdant instead — and use the burst of vines to pin Crow to a wall or floor. No injury, no killing, no need to kill: pin her, and let Salay take the ship. *That's brilliant!*

She loads the rebuilt flare along with a small zephyr firing charge into the gun, sights along its stubby barrel without pulling — the cabin is no place for the proof — and sets it down. The next problem is how to test it: it needs to hit something hard enough to crack the water cartridge, and she does not want to fire out the porthole, nor risk Crow catching wind of any of this.

Glancing aside, she finds Huck climbed out from under his bowl at last. He notes that she looks sad, and tells her gently that she is good and she is smart and she will find a way. *If I do*, she says, *it means consigning Crow to death. Her disease will eat her from the inside if she doesn't make a trade with the dragon.* Huck wrings his paws and does not say the obvious thing about Crow not deserving sympathy, because they both already know that, and the narrator notes that sympathy is not a valve a person can close at will; the road to a life without empathy is long and painful, with one's humanity sold off at a steep discount along the way.

To get out of her own head she picks up the timer she set aside. The little verdant vine inside is a sample from a real cannonball, already grown. She pours a little water on it. The vine curls, trembles, and grows. Then the growing tip — to her surprise — turns toward her. She scoots her chair; the tip turns to follow. She scoots back; the vine zigzags after her. When she puts a finger out it grows to touch her; when she spirals her fingertip in the air, the vine becomes a tight corkscrew. It responds to her — not to Huck, who is closer. Because he is a rat? Because he is afraid of it? But she is also afraid of spores — only, she realises, not of this one, not at this moment. She is not afraid right now. As she had when she shaped the midnight aether, she feels a small Connection to the creature: something empty and reaching, looking for her. *I understand*, she thinks, letting it coil softly around her finger. It is not a menacing grip. It is something more like a puppy.

The vine runs out of water and stops. She looks across at her shelf of cups. She is still fond of them, she admits to herself, but really only because they remind her of Charlie. They have lost the charm they once had. She has seen too much of the world now — not only the places. Fort has his hunts; Ann has her guns. She wants to save Charlie, but that is a goal, not a purpose. The narrator closes the chapter with the larger lesson she is feeling toward. Bravery is the wind that lifts a person like a kite, fear the string that keeps her from going too far, and the world has consistently taught people to fear some of the wrong things — strange new neighbours, spores, aethers — when the actual hazards are usually somewhere else. Let go of certain fears and assumptions and an entire world opens up.