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The face of the Aureline blockade pressure point in The Doorstep. The Combine has closed the lane the valley bet its harvest on — choking the colony with a clean stamp rather than a shot. Orsel is the settler woman Cross watches lose an argument with a closed lane; later, at the trestle market, she presses a fruit she grew into Ensign Jonah Vinter's hands — something her own ground made, on a world that "was poison twenty years back" — telling him to carry it up to the ship as the thing nobody up there can suspend. She is the voice that names the limit of Cross's win: he went round the fence, he did not take it down. "They like the part where you saved us.