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yourself reminded me not long ago. We can’t afford to be at war with our own citizens just now.”
    I smiled, a small, noncommittal expression. “Indeed, we can’t.” Governor Giarod’s relationship with Captain Hetnys had been, I was sure, somewhat ambivalent. That didn’t rule out her possibly being my enemy now. But if she was, she apparently wasn’t willing to move against me openly just yet. I was, after all, the one of us with the armed ship, and the soldiers. “Let’s be sure that includes all of our citizens, shall we, Governor?”

3
    Housing, on a Radchaai station, takes several different forms. The assumption is that one generally lives in a household—parents, grandparents, aunts, cousins, perhaps servants and clients if one’s family is wealthy enough. Sometimes such households are organized around a particular station official—the governor’s residence, or the head priest’s household adjacent to the temple of Amaat on the concourse, where surely a number of junior priests also lived.
    If you grew up in such a household, or took an assignment associated with one, you didn’t need to request housing from Station Administration. Your housing assignment had been made long before you were born, long before the aptitudes sent you to your post. It helped, of course, to belong to a family that had been present when a station was first built, or annexed. Or to be related to one somehow. When I had been a ship, every one of my officers who had lived on stations had belonged to such households.
    If a citizen doesn’t belong to such a household, they’re still due housing, as every citizen is. A citizen without sufficientstatus, or the backing of a larger, more powerful house, might find herself assigned to a bunk in a dormitory, not much different from what I had been accustomed to as an ancillary, or the common soldiers’ quarters on board Mercy of Kalr . Or one of a series of suspension-pod-size compartments, each one large enough to sleep in and perhaps hold a change of clothes or a few small possessions. Athoek Station had both of these sorts of quarters. But they were all full, because the recent destruction of several intersystem gates had re-routed ships here, and trapped others. And the closure of the Undergarden had added several hundred more citizens who needed somewhere to sleep. My Mercy of Kalrs had set up our makeshift lodgings just beyond a doorway that led to a room full of bunks, dark and quiet despite the hour, one when most station residents would be awake. Overcrowded, certainly, and likely people were sleeping in shifts.
    Eight was relieved to see me, for some reason, but also filled with indecision and ambivalence. Days ago she’d thought me entirely human. Now she knew, as everyone aboard Mercy of Kalr did, that I was not, that I was an ancillary. Now she knew, too, how much I objected to my soldiers’ playing ancillary themselves. She was at a loss as to how to speak to me.
    “Eight,” I said. “Everything’s under control, I see. No surprise there.”
    “Thank you, sir.” Eight’s uncertainty barely showed in her face or her voice—should she continue her habitual ancillary-like impassiveness, or not? Suddenly even this small interaction was precarious, where before all had been clear to her. Kalr Five felt the same, I saw, but covered her doubt with the business of stowing her precious tea set. Eight continued, “Will you have tea, sir?”
    I didn’t doubt that even here in the middle of a hallwayEight could, and would, produce tea for me if I said that I wanted it. “Thank you, no. I’ll have water.” I sat on a packing crate, turned so I could see down the open end of the corridor.
    “Sir,” Eight acknowledged. Impassive, but my reply had cast her further into doubt. Of course. Ancillaries drank water, not tea, which was only for humans, a luxury—a necessary one, it sometimes seemed. Not that there was any sort of prohibition, but one didn’t waste such