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when we'll find more water."
     
    "Slaughter it, Vree, don't patronize me! I hate it when you do that. I've always hated it!"
     
    Always hated it?
     
    Pursing her lips, she pressed her face against the water and carefully sucked from just below the surface. It was still night-cool but with a faint, flat taste of the heat it had held the day before. Fortunately, the goats hadn't had the chance to stir up much of the gritty silt. Vree drank past desire, until she sloshed when she moved, then took a dagger to her tunic and breeches.
     
    First the long sleeves, then the high collar, then a double hands span ripped ragged from the bottom of each leg—the fine, closely woven cotton, dyed and redyed to match the darkness, tore easily. She knotted the narrow ends of the sleeves and filled them with the weapons she could no longer hide as well as the supple ankle boots that were a better indication of her profession than any number of concealed daggers. A fistful of damp sand scrubbed the charcoal from hands and face.
     
    After a thorough roll in the pale dirt, Vree bent and forced herself to take one last drink. As she lifted her head, she frowned at a shadowy indentation, newly delineated by the rising sun. "Bannon, look there."
     
    "I look where you look," he muttered. Then she felt his mood change as he saw what she saw. On the other side of the watering hole, an earlier visitor had braced his weight, leaned forward to drink and left a clear impression of the heel and thumb of his right hand. "Mine. That's my handprint. He came this way, Vree! I told you so! We're almost on him. Get up! Get going!"
     
    She'd trusted her brother's judgment in a thousand situations where a mistake would mean both their deaths. She trusted it now although she could see nothing familiar in the curves pressed into the damp earth. Securing her narrow pack with the silken length of her garrote, she slung it across her body and hurried north.
     
    It was mid-morning when Vree heard the sound of a horse approaching from behind. She turned, shaded her eyes against the glare from above and the stone dust glare from below, and squinted back down the South Road. "Courier." The word was flat, inflectionless, but her heart began to pound a little faster. They should have expected this; in this part of the Empire the South Road was the only road the army bothered to keep way stations on. In this part of the Empire, it was the only road that went anywhere. "The marshal's probably sending news of the governor's death to the garrison."
     
    "The governor isn't dead."
     
    "He is as far as the Sixth Army is concerned. There's a body and there's no one to lead the rebellion. What more do they need?"
     
    "Us?"
     
    "If Emo squealed, we'd have had to kill someone long before now."
     
    "Yeah, but Emo's a drunk, Vree. We can't count on him not to spill his guts the next time he crawls into a wineskin. Or the next time. Or the time after that."
     
    "You're right." She started back the way they'd come. "Let's go back and kill him."
     
    "What are you doing? We have to find Aralt!"
     
    "Then you shut up about Emo! Maybe I should've killed him, okay? But he's alive and he knows and there's not a slaughtering thing we can do about it!"
     
    As the courier rode closer, she dropped her head and continued slogging north, shoulders hunched, bare feet splayed out against the heated stone, nothing in her bearing suggesting she'd ever marched behind the Empire's banner.
     
    She needn't have bothered. The courier trotted past, the sunburst pennant on his lance tip snapping, eyes under the crested helm locked ahead on the distance still to be covered. One skinny, filthy traveler meant nothing to him. After all, the Empire had built the roads to be traveled on.
     
    As horse and rider and road disappeared behind an outcrop of faded pink stone, Vree scrubbed at a dribble of sweat between her breasts and shook her head. "Bannon, this is impossible. We need more to go on than