Sarge hesitates, then smiles back, kind of shy. "If you want. Sure. I didn't get too far into this one." He flicks the electronic pages back, and starts again: "She saw the knight in the mirror at sunset. He road alone down a road along a river. Where the black cloak he wore parted over his surcoat, she glimpsed towers of gold."

The story is one of towers: one in a happy kingdom with a wedding that might not be what it seems, one with a woman locked away with a mirror and a loom, one with a dragon, and one by the sea with a girl and her mother. The three disparate stories weave together in unexpected ways. Sarge, who's been having trouble turning words on a page into images in his head, actually finds himself hamming it up a little for Murderbot. Everyone gets slightly different voices and accents. He puts more tone into the feelings of people who don't exist than he usually manages for his own voice.

He gets about a third of the way through, to when one of the characters found and tamed the dragon in its tower, before he has to put it down for a minute and stretch his legs out.