text: It was a good day for an invasion.
  
  "Tear it open," Kirana said.
  
  She stood on a broad wooden walkway erected for just this purpose – to help propel her army over the swamp and through the gate as quickly as possible, before it closed. In the other world, the new world, there was a lake where she stood. On this side her people had filled it in long before, but as the climate changed with the blazing star, the glaciers on the surrounding mountains had sloughed off and turned the lowlands into a tepid swamp.
  
  The mirror was broken. Every good commander had two or three alternate plans, but this was the one she liked the least. With Saiduan all but routed, its libraries sacked, she needed to turn her attention to the next phase of their invasion: cross over into the now weakened Dorinah, the country with the softest and largest rent between her world and the next. She could take out Dorinah and get her people safely established there, just in time for planting season. That gave her the summer to continue to hammer at Dhai, though she expected it would not take that long, not unless they figured out what she wanted there before she had it.
  
  Across the swampy marsh, Yisaoh watched them from atop a great white bear. She wore a massive brown cap, her hair twisted around its base in black braids, knotted in tiny beads and bells. She was the most extraordinary person Kirana had ever seen, and she suspected now, even preparing to cross into another world, that Yisaoh would remain so. Her heart ached, and for a wild moment she wished she had permitted their children to watch. But the children were very young, and the outcome of this breach was uncertain. Kirana could lose half her army if the gate collapsed while they were still in transit. She had lost countless thousands to failed gates in the early days of the war. It's why she had devoted so much time to the mirror. Another failed endeavor.
  
  "On my command," Gaiso, Kirana's parajista company general, said. She was a plump woman with broad hands and features. It had been a boon her shadow was already killed in some petty skirmish on the other side. Kirana hadn't wanted to settle for the second.
  
  Kirana braced herself. Those unfamiliar with tearing open the way between worlds often thought the end of the line was a safer place to be, but she knew better. As the first one through, right up alongside the omajistas who opened the thing, she could get herself clear of any blowback. Sometimes when the way opened it imploded, yes – but an implosion didn't affect those who had already gone through. If she ended up in the wrong world, well – that's why she only stepped through next to an omajista. Her own skills with the dark star didn't bend in that direction, much to her frustration.
  
  Fourteen omajistas raised their hands. All around the field, for as far as Kirana could see, were cart after cart of jars filled with blood. When the omajistas said what they had brought was not sufficient, Kirana had killed another fourteen of her own people, drawn by lot, and piled their bodies, too, at the edge of the swamp. It was amazing what a person would put up with, when freedom from certain death was so close. Many turned on comrades, men and women they had fought with most of their lives.
  
  The jars burst. Kirana stood her ground. Did not close her eyes. Did not cover her ears. This was the greatest expenditure they had ever made, and she had to be present and aware. Because they would end up in a lake, she'd had to remove her armor. Behind her, the twenty thousand troops she intended to bring with her were a nearly-nude bunch, scratching at the dark seeds of the weapons in their wrists.
  
  The air shuddered. A great weight descended on them, and something more – wind. A wind so hot and sudden Kirana caught her breath.
  
  A black storm of blood poured into the sky from the shattered jars, a wave so mortifying that Kirana had woken screaming for three months after seeing her first. Now it looked like freedom to her. Promise.
  
  It looked like survival.
  
  The bloody gate coagulated ahead of her. She felt the soft crimson mist against her face. Her ears popped. The blood folded in on itself, as if devouring its own substance from the inside out. A seam opened in the world, a massive tear. Kirana saw a cold blue lake shining before her on the other side. Dark trees. Low mountains.
  
  Gaiso barked at her parajistas. The wind kicked up again. The lake ahead of them on the other side rippled, then went still.
  
  "It's solid," Gaiso said, and stepped through the tear in the worlds and onto the invisible bridge of air now riding the surface of the lake.
  
  Kirana could not see work done by parajistas – she was a tirajista with some sensitivity to Oma – but if Gaiso said it was good, she trusted it.
  
  She wanted to say something hopeful or inspiring, but her feet were already moving. She didn't even look up at the black, toxic star in her sky. Only when she stepped onto the hard surface above the glassy lake did she look back once, at Yisaoh. But the angle was all wrong: Kirana could no longer see her. And she needed to move, move, move because her army was coming behind her, and the longer they were on the bridge, the more vulnerable they were.
  
  "Fan out," Gaiso said to her parajistas, and as they came through, the hundred parajistas leaped out across the water, skipping on it like stones, to take scouting positions along the perimeter of the lake.
  
  Kirana did not release her weapon, but she stayed at the center of the next wave, a mixed contingent of tirajistas and regular infantry. The scouts said the area was clear. With the Empress's Seekers scattered to the winds and most of the country's publicly-owned Dhai slaves dead, there was little to impede their progress.
  
  As they marched across the lake, Kirana's stomach churned. She tried to look straight ahead. She couldn't swim, and losing the bridge would be embarrassing at best – deadly at worst.
  
  Gaiso glanced over at her. "Not seeing any movement."
  
  "It's quiet here this time of year," Kirana said. "I'll be confident when the whole army's through, though."
  
  "She's not a fool," Gaiso said.
  
  Kirana made a pinched motion with her hand. She had no interest in discussing the Empress of Dorinah within hearing of half her army. She was well aware the Empress wasn't a fool. If she had given over her Seekers and the dajians so easily, it meant she was confident she had something else she could use against them. Something far worse.
  
  The Empress had sent a company to Tordin. For whatever purpose she sent them there, it left her even more vulnerable. And unlike tiny little Dhai, Dorinah had enough land to support a vast number of Kirana's people. If the end came in the next few months instead of the next year, she'd have at least saved this many. It was a risk to move now, but far riskier to wait.
  
  Kirana jumped from the bridge of air onto dry land, and resisted the urge to kiss it.
  
  The tirajistas closed ranks. Kirana moved further up the shoreline to wait for the mounts and supply carts.
  
  Her infantry commander's squire, Lohin, met her on the low rise. "The squad's about done with the way house," he said, motioning to the squat little building on the opposite shore. "Should be cleared out shortly." Lohin was a mean-faced little man, wiry and stooped. She was not particularly taken with his talent on the field, but he was Yisaoh's brother, and she'd promised Yisaoh she'd get him to the other side, one way or another.
  
  "I'll wait for your mother's all clear on that," Kirana said.
  
  Lohin's jaw hardened, but he only pressed thumb to forehead and trudged back down the path. She imagined it would not be so terrible, to serve as squire to one's mother, but Lohin resented every hand she offered him. He didn't even have the good sense to thank her for getting him across. Kirana watched his back, wondering if she should tell him the murder of his shadow had been accidental, and if it'd been up to her, she'd have continued to leave that particular death up to chance until the bitter end.
  
  But here they were.
  
  When she heard the all-clear for the way house, Kirana made her way there, where her pages were already mopping up the blood and pushing together the inn tables. Six bodies were stacked outside.
  
  The infantry commander, Rasina, stood just inside the door, arms crossed. "Got someone for you to see," she said.
  
  Kirana gestured at the pile of bodies. "That not all of them?"
  
  Rasina laughed. She was a long, lean woman – Lohin's mother through marriage, not birth – and she had a warmer face. "Sure isn't," she said, and gestured Kirana upstairs.
  
  Kirana's wrist itched. Her everpine weapon already tasted her unease. "You going to give me a hint?" Kirana said, trying to keep her tone light. She had had enough horrible things happen in this horrible war to last eight lifetimes.
  
  Rasina glanced back. Grinned. She came to the top of the stairs and opened a guestroom door wide. The air inside was heavy. Two parajistas and an omajista stood in the room, their specialties clear from the symbols on their collars.
  
  A woman lay prone in the bed, arms held stiffly at her sides, obviously bound by the jistas. It took only half a breath for Kirana to recognize her.
  
  "Oma's eye," Kirana said. She grinned now too, and met Rasina's merry look. "This is the happiest coincidence of the war."
  
  "Isn't it, though?" Rasina said.
  
  Kirana bent over the bed. It was the same woman, aged ten years from the one Kirana had fused with her mirror on the other side, but easily recognizable.
  
  "Nava Sona," Kirana said. "You have no idea how pleased I am to find you here."