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I watch him leave, eyes colder than my smile.

Several of the other lancers attend the conference with Roque. The rest make themselves comfortable as Augustus’s Gray security teams comb the grounds. Obsidian bodyguards trail Golds like shadows. Pinks sway gracefully into the villa in a constant stream, ordered from the Citadel’s Garden by members of the ArchGovernor’s household staff who find themselves bored from travel and seek a little merriment.

A Pink Citadel steward guides me to my room. I laugh when I arrive. “Perhaps there has been a mistake,” I say, looking around the small room with its adjoining washroom and closet. “I’m not a broom.”

“I don’t under—”

“He’s not a broom, so he won’t fit in this closet,” Theodora says, standing in the doorway behind us. “It is beneath his station.” She looks around, pert nose sniffing disdainfully. “These would not even suit as closet to my clothes on Mars.”

“This is the Citadel. Not Mars.” The steward’s pink eyes survey the lines on Theodora’s aged face. “There is less room for useless things.”

Theodora smiles sweetly and gestures to the rose-quartz tree pinned to the man’s breast. “I say! Is that the black poplar of Garden Dryope?”

“Your fi

rst time seeing it, I would guess,” he says haughtily before turning to me. “I don’t know how they raised your Pinks in Mars’s Gardens, dominus, but on Luna your slave should do her best to look less affected.”

“Of course. How rude of me,” Theodora apologizes. “I merely thought you would know Matron Carena.”

The steward pauses. “Matron Carena …”

“We were girls together in the Gardens. Tell her Theodora says hello and would call on her if time is found.”

“You’re a Rose.” His face goes sheet white.

“Was. All petals wilt. Oh, but do tell me your name. I would so like to commend you to her for your hospitality.”

He mumbles something quite inaudible and departs, bowing lower to Theodora than to me.

“Was that fun?” I ask.

“Always nice to flex a little muscle. Even if everything else is starting to droop.”

“Seems my career ends where yours began.” I chuckle morbidly and walk over to the holoDisplay sitting near the bed.

“I wouldn’t,” she says.

I bite my bottom lip, our signal for spying devices.

“Well, of course, that. But the holoNet is … not where you want to be right now.”

“What are they saying about me?”

“They’re wondering where you’ll be buried.”

I haven’t time to reply before knuckles rap against the frame of my room’s doorway.

I follow Victra’s Pink to her room’s private terrace. Seems her bath alone is larger than my bed.

“It’s not fair,” a voice says from behind the ivory-white trunk of a lavender tree. I turn to see Victra playing with the thorns of a shrub “You being cut loose like a Gray mercenary.”

“Since when have you been concerned with what’s fair, Victra?”

“Must you always fence with me?” she asks. “Come sit.” Even with the scars that distinguish her from her sister, her long form and luminous face is without true fault. She sits smoking some designer burner that smells like a sunset over a logged forest. She’s heavier of bone than Antonia, taller, and seems to have been melted into being, like a spearhead cooling into angular shape. Her eyes flash with annoyance. “I’m as far from an enemy as you have, Darrow.”

“So what are you? A friend?”

“A man in your position could use friends, no?”