Chapter 14: Mira's Taxonomy of Useful Versus Beautiful Deaths

The footsteps do not announce themselves further. There is simply a silence, and then the silence has a shape, and then the shape resolves into Mira Ashwood pulling herself through the maintenance hatch at the catwalk's eastern end with the unhurried efficiency of someone completing a task she budgeted time for.

She is carrying more than she arrived with. A pack — not her original, or perhaps her original augmented — sits across her shoulders, and there is a long coil of wire at her hip that Hamlet recognizes as stripped from the arena's lighting infrastructure. Her face has a cut above the left cheekbone, three days old at most, already closed. She surveys the platform in the time it takes most people to clear a doorway: him, the book, Rue sitting cross-legged with her cracker, the two packs, the thermal blanket, the sightlines, the exits.

"North hatch is faster," she says to Rue, "but the east one doesn't creak."