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Zahel hangs naked and shackled to the ceiling of a small circular cell, joking blackly to himself about how many times in his long life he has ended up exactly here. He has been a prisoner since the Urithiru invasion — weeks, he thinks, though he cannot be sure, because he keeps erasing his own memories of the pain in order to deny his captors the trauma that should accumulate from torture. The walls are lined with aluminum sheeting, sealed against any spren-sense; the only objects in the room with him are a bookcase, an unused mattress, his own dried blood on the floor, and one bright crimson parrot in a perchless cage just out of reach.

He has been stripped on purpose. Without clothing he has nothing to Awaken, no improvised weapon, no escape. He sags in his chains, hair stringy around his face, and lets himself notice — not for the first time — that he wonders why he keeps doing this. Centuries of it. Friends dead. Most recently a woman left behind back on Nalthis who had believed in him. He had told himself he was retiring; in truth he had run.

The parrot worries him more than his own state. It has gone quiet, head down, and a quiet parrot is a parrot in serious trouble. He calls to it twice without effect, then tries an infant's peekaboo game — *peeky time, peeky time* — until at last the bird lifts its head and repeats the words back in its small avian voice. He has just begun to coax it further when the cell door opens.

Axindweth slips in, rings glittering on every finger and a bright green Aviar perched on her shoulder. She greets him by his old name — *Vasher* — clicks her tongue, and her Aviar mimics the sound back. She has finally found the tool she has been searching for. From a presentation box she takes out a small fabrial shaped like a short handgun, spikes set in the muzzle: a painrial, a *more efficient way of making you hurt.* She offers him a compromise: half his Breaths — an admittedly enormous trove of Investiture he should never have brought to this world — and she will let him walk out the door.

Zahel does the arithmetic he has done a hundred times before in other rooms much like this one. He does not need those particular Breaths; he could in fact afford to lose them. But half is not freedom. Half is the opening bid in a series of demands, each *burgundy victory* set up to extract the next, and he has watched this game play out in too many cells already to mistake it for negotiation. It is one more attempt to break him down, and he is a man very tired of being broken down. So he says nothing. He has outlasted captors who threatened worse than her, on worlds she has never heard of, and he tells her so. She laughs, calls it bluster, and lifts the painrial. He spares one last guilty look for the crimson parrot that has to watch this — and then he stops talking and gives Axindweth what she actually came for, which is the screaming.