Mare heads home, along the way giving us some more details about her world. The most important being that there’s a place called Summerton nearby, a small town supported by the royals’ summer palace and the entourage of nobles that follow them when they stay there. Mare’s little sister, Gisa, works there.

She goes inside, we meet Gisa and her parents, and then we get a description of Mare’s hair, because why not.

Dark at the root, pale at the ends, as the color leeches from our hair with the stress of Stilts life. Most keep their hair short to hide their grey ends, but I don’t. I like the reminder that even my hair knows life shouldn’t be this way.

So, I kind of like the sentiment, but that’s not how hair works. It loses color from being in the sun, and even then it doesn’t turn grey, it just turns a lighter shade of brown. (Or, some really dark shades, it turns red! Ish.) Stress just makes your hair fall out, not the color.

We get some proud/jealous boasting from Mare about how her sister is so talented that she’ll be able to achieve some financial stability once she’s old enough to open her own shop.

Mare’s father coughs so she can inform us that he only has one lung, the other being replaced by a mechanical device. …so, this is a world where the poor people don’t have vehicles, bikes are a luxury, Gisa is doing all her sewing by hand, and so far we’ve seen very little technology of any kind that isn’t in the hands of the ruling class…but they have mechanical lungs? I mean, it’s even possible to live without one of your lungs, so that thing’s purely an extra now.

Speaking of extras, Mare’s parents aren’t pleased with her thievery. Since so far she’s only mentioned buying cake and presents for her father’s upcoming birthday, I’m assuming that they don’t actually rely on her to stay afloat. …and I’m okay with that. The world sucks, and even though her family seems to be technically sustaining themselves on legal means, it’s still some pretty mind-and-soul crushing poverty going on here. Mare’s got the bitterness to carry some not-for-survival thievery as a trait, and she does mention that she just wants to leave something behind to help her family before she goes off to war. I can dig it.

Except. Except. We really don’t get to see much of the town she’s in because everything she says about the world is about the divide between Reds and Silvers. There’s not been any gradation in the Reds yet, except for the theoretical one in saying that Gisa can be comfortably well off. So far the Reds have been at a homogenous level of poor, as far as we know, and if they’re at Barrow Household levels of poor…look, I’m fine with Mare stealing because she’s angry and because “technically getting by” is absolutely not enough for the health of the human psyche (and body), but not if it’s at the expense of other people who are in the same situation.

They get a letter from Mare’s brother Shade (weird name) which is an excuse for more infodumping about the world and the war that’s being fought. Apparently this war has been going on for decades, which seems odd for a world that has bombs and planes. Usually with something that mass-casualty producing, you just plum run out of bodies for you reach “decades” of fighting.

Then the lights go off, because no one turned in the electricity ration slips that Mare stole for them. While the family sees this as an excuse to go off to bed, (wait, if First Friday is mandatory for everyone and only Gisa had work, why didn’t her mom and dad attend?) But then Kilorn shows up to talk to Mare.

It turns out Kilorn’s trade master died in an accident, and without a master Kilorn technically isn’t an apprentice anymore. All the others already have apprentices, so he’s going to end up conscripted as well. Dun dun dun.

So far I do like the world. It’s got a nice tone of misery, but doesn’t feel melodramatic. Weirdly, a lot of the details hold together just fine and dandy, but it’s the major things like Mare’s thievery and the X-men fights that cause problems. Also this whole chapter was pretty useless. It really should have been combined with the first chapter and leave us with Kilorn’s dilmena as the hook into the rest of the novel. Take out the fight, which only made plotholes anyway, and maybe just have a super-powered security guard throwing his weight around to introduce the concept, then…well, hm, I like some of the stuff that came up in the family scene, like the implication that Mare isn’t thieving for survival, but it’s just so dragging, and right at the start of the story. I think, even with all the good lines, it just really needs to go. Get us right into Kilorn and his inadvertent efforts to kick off some sort of a plot.