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on the bed, neck resting on an iron pillow. Her arms were crossed austerely over her breast and she was still wearing her armor, like some ancient statue. Lunae could not help wondering whether the ar-mor provided some kind of support system; certainly Dreams-of-War never seemed to remove it, and she had never joined Lunae in the bathing chamber. This was per-haps a relief. Lunae thought that it would be disturbing to see her guardian naked. She imagined Dreams-of-War as cold and pale, with flesh as hard as marble. Surely she was never as vulnerable as the unraveled contents of the chrysalis.
    Dreams-of-War had told her that the armor was old and that it marked her as a member of the Memnos Matri-archy. When Lunae had been able to access her buried memories, she had learned of the women of the Memnos Tower—the current rulers of Mars and Earth. She learned how they had taken pity on the weakness of humans and created the kappa and other creatures to serve the people of Earth.
    Her guardian's words echoed in her mind: " The Mar-tians have always been superior. It is, after all, we who colo-nized Earth thousands of years ago . My ancestors come from the ice palaces of the far south; they roamed the snow-seas in far prehistory ."
    Now Dreams-of-War reached out a spiny hand and, careful not to touch Lunae's face, took a strand of hair be-tween her fingers. Lunae squinted down, surprised, for Dreams-of-War had long ago expressed a dislike of inti-mate contact. The dark red threads glistened against the Martian woman's fingernails, the armored hand changing, becoming spidery and delicate.
    "I'm glad you understand me," Dreams-of-War said. "You are nine months old, almost grown. Soon you will be a woman. You are old enough to obey instruction without mutiny."
    "I do the best I can," Lunae protested.
    "You do tolerably well, at that. But you must do better, and that means practicing restraint."
    Dreams-of-War squatted on armored heels until she was level with Lunae's gaze. The armor flowed smoothly to accommodate the movement: needles retracting, joints shifting.
    Lunae shifted uncomfortably on the window ledge.
    "What's the matter?"
    "It's just—how am I ever to grow and learn if I am not allowed out of the house?"
    She had seen little even of the harbor, except glimpses from the heights of Cloud Terrace and through the spy-eyes that the Grandmothers had installed in the streets be-tween the tenements of the Peak.
    Lunae spent hours in front of the oreagraph, watching everyday life pass before the spy-eyes. She knew that the Grandmothers would for-bid this if they knew, but Dreams-of-War had once caught her in front of the oreagraph and had turned away without saying a word. Later, she had devoted a lesson to the work-ings of the oreagraph: ostensibly a theoretical study, but Lunae took it for approval nonetheless.
    From the altered perspective of the spy-eyes, the man-sion in which Lunae now sat resembled a wrecked vessel, a sprawling black mass of uneven wings and curling gables, pagoda-roofed, as though cast up by some impos-sibly high tide. Cloud Terrace was a vulture-house, she thought, with the Grandmothers squatting at its heart.
    On the rare occasions that Lunae had been taken down into the streets of the Peak, beyond the weir-wards of Cloud Terrace, she had been made to stay in an en-closed litter. Frustrated, confined by lacquer walls, Lunae had listened to the multiple babble of Cantonese, Kitachi Malaya, and the Lost Tongues of the north, smelled smoke and kimchi and lemongrass, the odors of the tea stalls, and the blood that ran from the slaughter-racks of the meat market. She had been unable to catch even a glimpse of the world around her. But for once, Dreams-of-War and her kappa nurse had been in agreement with the Grand-mothers' dictates: Lunae should not be exposed to the view of the general populace. Lunae did not understand why this should be.
    But now rebellion rose in Lunae's breast like the silk-moth in its