Chapter 3

The quartermaster of the Third Barracks was a round, worried man named Ho Dan who flinched when officers came into his storehouse, because officers only came when something was missing. In her first life Yeon Seol had spoken to him perhaps a dozen times in forty years, all of them about numbers. He had kept the Gate fed through the famine of year nineteen by means she had never asked about, and he had died in year thirty-one, still worried, still flinching.

This time she came in, stamped the snow off her boots, and asked him to teach her the ledger.

"Teach you — the ledger, Lieutenant?" He looked at her the way men look at weather they don't trust. "It's only counting."

"I have been told," she said, "that wars are won by counting." She had been told that by him, as it happened, in a sentence he would not say for another nine years. He would say it at a funeral. She intended to arrange for the funeral not to occur.