She had killed the scout without hesitation because he had seen her face, and faces in the Underdark are currency that can be spent in ways their owners rarely survive. The body lay at the threshold of the surface tunnel, half in shadow, half in the grey light that filtered through roots and crumbled stone, and Minthara stepped over it the way one steps over a fallen branch. The surface opened above her. Not gradually, the way the old texts had described it, but all at once, an obscenity of space that pressed against her skull and made her grip her blade with both hands despite there being nothing to fight. Sky. They called it sky. She stood at the mouth of the tunnel and forced herself to look up, which was the first act of discipline the surface demanded of her, and it would not be the last. The wind moved her hair in a direction she had never experienced, and she catalogued the sensation the way she catalogued everything, as information that might one day save her life or end someone else's...