The sunlight over Swettenham Pier always carried a quality of false brightness.

  Rohan stood in the corridor of the barracks, dressed in his crisp dark blue reserve uniform, boots polished to a mirror finish. He had grown accustomed to this life: the punctual bugle call, the reliable rations, the satisfying exhaustion of the drill ground. He felt he had put down roots in this forest of stone.

  But whenever he stepped outside the iron gates of the garrison and walked into the quarter where his Ezan kinspeople lived, that sense of achievement dissolved almost immediately.

  There was no fragrance of flower water in the air here. Only rotting sea-fish and a suffocating salt-stench. He saw his people — those who had once run free beneath the sacred mountain just as he had — crouched now in the shadows of stone buildings like the walking dead. Their eyes were vacant. When a Solarian carriage passed, they would lower their heads without thinking, step aside, shrink back into the gutter.

  That was not humility. That was something that had gone all the way past humility into a kind of total erasure.

  The feeling reached its worst at the unloading dock.

  "Move it! You spineless sloths!"

  CRACK—

  A sharp, vicious sound split the sea-fog. Rohan stopped dead.

  Beside a massive treadwheel crane built from thick oak beams, a heavyset Solarian overseer was swinging a brine-soaked rattan cane across the back of an elderly labourer with furious repetition. The old man's back had already been laid open, but he did not dare fall — he held himself upright on trembling legs, bearing the weight of a crate of heavy iron components that should have taken two men to carry.

  The Ezan around him kept their heads down and moved their loads with mechanical steadiness, as though the cane were landing on something that was not a human being.

  The heat rose through Rohan so fast it reached his head before he could think. He forgot everything Keling had said about order. He crossed the ground in long strides and caught the overseer's arm at the top of its next arc.

  "Stop. He has no strength left!" Rohan shouted in his clumsy but forceful Solarian.

  The overseer went still. He turned and looked Rohan's smart uniform up and down with deliberate contempt. Then a slow, twisting sneer spread across his face.

  "Well, well. What have we here. A mud-whelp in a man's clothes." He spat on the ground. "Don't imagine that having Keling that bloody bastard you up means you've risen above your station. In Solarian eyes, Keling is nothing but the most talented lapdog in the rainforest. And you—"

  The overseer wrenched his arm free and put his finger in Rohan's face.

  "You are the lapdog's little pup. Get back to your barracks and keep your hands out of the business of your betters."

  Something detonated inside Rohan's head. That word — lapdog — was a rusted file dragged across the dignity he had spent months carefully constructing, reducing it to powder in a single stroke.

  He did not think. In that moment he was no longer a reserve soldier of any civilisation — he was the same creature that had torn the mother bear apart in the Manuk sacred ground. His fist connected with the overseer's nose before the man had time to register what was happening.

  "AAAGH—!"

  The overseer went down screaming. But before Rohan could follow through, Solarian patrol guards came surging in from all sides.

  "Seize that man!"

  Rohan fought back with everything he had. It made no difference. The Solarian soldiers who had always been carefully civil toward him now let something long-suppressed show through their eyes. They drove rifle butts into the back of his skull, pressed boots into his face, and tore his prized uniform to pieces.

  That night, Rohan was brought before the magistrate's court. No defence was offered. Keling did not appear. The fat Solarian judge did not even look up from his papers before issuing the verdict in a flat voice.

  "Assault and insubordination. Twelve strokes of the cane."

  Strapped to the punishment frame in the courthouse, Rohan heard again the sound he had come to hate most in the world — the whistle of rattan cutting through air.

  Twelve strokes. Each one landing with precision across the same place on his back where the crescent-marked hide had once rested. The burning, searing pain made something very clear: the uniform he had worn with such pride, and the identity it represented, was thinner than paper when measured against the law of these white giants.

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  Late that night, Keling appeared in the dim confinement cell. He was, as always, in his immaculate suit. His eyes in the low lamplight were unreadable.

  "You should not have raised your hand, Rohan." Keling sat on the bench, his voice so composed it was unsettling.

  "They called us monkeys!" Rohan lay face-down in the dry grass, each word pulling at the wounds across his back. "They treat our people like livestock! Keling — is this what you called civilisation?"

  Keling laughed softly. He lit a cigar, and blue smoke drifted in thin coils past the iron window bars.

  "They were right. We are the monkeys of the rainforest. I am. So are you." He drew on the cigar and looked at Rohan. "But understand this — the Solarians are only monkeys who evolved a little earlier on the other side of the ocean. They mastered the technology to make the whip, so they became the masters. That is all."

  "This is the price of progress, Rohan. If you want to stop receiving the whip, you must become the one who holds it — not waste yourself on sympathy for those too broken to stand up. That kind of sympathy is savage. It will destroy everything you've built."

  Rohan closed his eyes. Keling's logic was like something viscous and adhesive, trying to stop up the wound in his chest that was still bleeding.

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  In the days that followed, Rohan changed.

  He returned to the barracks, but he no longer walked with his head up. When he passed his kinspeople on the street, he learned to look away. When he saw Solarian boys humiliating Ezan women in alleyways, when he watched guards seize a street vendor's grain — he would press the burning sensation down behind his eyes and walk past as though none of it concerned him.

  He kept telling himself: I am a civilised man. I am progressing. I cannot be impulsive like a monkey.

  Until the night the rain came down in walls.

  Rohan had taken shelter in a low-end dockside tavern, drinking to drown something that wouldn't quite drown. The place reeked of cheap malt ale and damp, mouldering tobacco.

  From a corner of the room came a burst of coarse laughter and a sharp cry that pulled every eye toward it.

  Several Solarian sailors, deep in drink, had a young Ezan serving girl pinned across a grease-filmed table. Her collar had been torn open, exposing a wide expanse of terrified skin.

  "Come on, jungle cat — let's see what the local breed has to offer!"

  The Solarian drunks around them did not intervene. They began to whistle and slap the tables, a few calling out encouragement with delighted enthusiasm.

  In her struggle, the girl's desperate gaze found Rohan where he sat at the bar.

  Time seemed to stop.

  In her eyes, Rohan saw the streams of home. He saw the Longhouse burning. He saw the faces of his people, one after another.

  "Help me… please…"

  Her voice made no sound. But he heard it.

  One of the sailors noticed Rohan's uniform and looked over with a sneer.

  "Well, isn't that Keling's little pet monkey." The sailor let out a gust of sour breath and moved his hand with unhurried deliberateness. "Watch carefully, little monkey. This is what your kind are for."

  Rohan's fingernails drove into his palms.

  Rage. Shame. Utter helplessness. Three forces tore at him from inside simultaneously. His soul was screaming. His body had locked solid with fear. He thought of the twelve welts across his back. He thought of Keling's lessons on progress.

  "Help—!"

  Rohan lurched to his feet. He did not draw the sidearm at his hip. He did not move toward the men.

  He pressed his hands over his ears like a man jolted out of a nightmare, barely holding back something that had been building behind his eyes for months, and stumbled out of the tavern and into the cold, pouring rain.

  He ran. His boots through the standing water made sounds like open-handed slaps. He ran until he hit a dead end — a blank wall of stone — and drove his fists into it.

  CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

  The skin split open across his knuckles. Blood ran down the stone face of the wall in thin lines, washed pale by the rain. He felt no pain. He felt only a nausea so complete it had no edges — a revulsion at his own smallness, at his own compromised, self-satisfied, so-called civilised cowardice.

  "AAAHHH——!"

  He screamed it into the sky.

  Then he ran to Keling's house. He did not knock. He shouldered the door open.

  Keling was in his armchair reading a newspaper. He looked up at this figure standing in his entrance — soaked through, bleeding from both fists, eyes at the very edge of something.

  "Is this your progress?" Rohan pointed back at the street, his voice shaking. "Watching our women be violated. Watching our people treated like animals. And we sit here like dogs wagging our tails?"

  Keling set the newspaper down with unhurried grace. A cold, precise smile curved at the corner of his mouth.

  "And what of it, Rohan? Pain is the finest catalyst there is. The women who suffer tonight will bear children with Solarian blood. The next generation of Ezan will be stronger in body and more advanced in mind. Don't trap yourself in narrow thinking — this is the leap of a species."

  Rohan went still.

  He looked at Keling's familiar face and saw, for the first time, that it was not familiar at all. It was a mask — assembled from cold, frictionless logic, with nothing underneath.

  "You're insane…" The words came out of Rohan like a sound from the bottom of a well.

  Keling said nothing. He lifted one hand and gestured, briefly, toward the door.

  Rohan walked out of the study in a daze. In the dark turn of the corridor, an Ezan maidservant who had been standing with her head bowed stepped suddenly forward.

  Rohan moved to push past her. The woman's hand shot out — quick and deliberate — and closed around his bleeding palm, pressing something cold and hard into it.

  She leaned close to his ear and spoke in the low, quiet, utterly certain dialect of home:

  "Tomorrow night. Behind the sunken wreck at the old dock."

  Rohan froze. The woman released his hand and, head still bowed, dissolved back into the shadow.

  Rohan opened his palm.

  Lying in the centre of that bloodied hand — the thing he had buried in a drawer and told himself he had left behind —

  The crescent-marked hide. Still carrying its smell of blood and earth.