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“Seems that’s the bed you made.”

“Do they have the votes to block my request?”

“They might.”

“Even if you apply pressure?”

“You mean even if I clean up your mess.” It wasn’t a question.

“I made the right decision,” I say. “I know I did. You know I did. They don’t know war. They were afraid of being held responsible for failure. What was I supposed to do? Comb my hair while they protected their reputations?”

“Maybe you should learn from them.”

“I’m not going to hold a poll in the middle of a war. You could have vetoed them.”

“I could have. But then they’d cry that I was protecting my husband, and the Vox would gain more even supporters.”

“Copper and Obsidian are still in play?”

“No. Caraval says the Coppers will back you. As goes Sefi, so goes Obsidian. What will she choose? You’d know better than I.”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “She was against the Rain, but she came with me.”

She’s silent at that.

“You think I’ve shot us in the foot, don’t you?”

“Does Dancer have anything else he can use against you?”

“No,” I say. I know she doesn’t believe me. And she knows I know, but she can’t ask any more. Though I want to tell her about the emissaries, it would incriminate her as well. Sevro and I agreed it was a secret that must stay within the Howlers. She would be bound by oath to tell the Senate. And she tried so hard to honor her new oaths.

“Dancer’s not the only one angry with me,” I say. “Pax would hardly look at me at dinner.”

“I saw.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I think you do.” She goes quiet. “We’re missing this,” she says eventually. “Life. The dinner tonight, I’ll remember forever. The lightning bugs. The children in the yard. The smell of rain on its way.” She looks over at me. “Just seeing you laughing. I shouldn’t remember it. It should be one of thousands.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that when my term of office ends in two years, maybe I won’t run again. Maybe I let the torch pass to someone else. You hand the reins to Orion or Harnassus. Maybe the rest of this isn’t our responsibility.” A tiny, hopeful smile crosses her lips. “We will go back to Mars and live in my estate. We’ll raise our children with your brother and sister’s and put our lives into helping our family, our planet. And each night we’d have a dinner like this one. Friends could come and go in our house whenever they passed through. The door would always be open….”

And an army would always have to guard it.

Her words carry away into the night, into the arms of the swaying trees, along with the current of the wind, up and up into the sky, where it seems all fantasies go. But I sit cold as a stone beside her, because I know she doesn’t believe any of this. We’ve played the game far too long to walk away. I take her hand. And as my wife is quiet and the fantasy drifts away, our familiar friend, dread, creeps onto the balcony with us, because deep inside, in the shadowy chasms of ourselves, we know Lorn was right. For those who dine with war and empire, the bill always comes at the end.

And almost as if the world was listening to my thoughts, a knock comes at the door. Mustang answers it, and when she returns her face belongs to the Sovereign, not my wife. “It was Daxo. Dancer’s called an emergency session of the Senate. They’ve moved your hearing up to tomorrow night.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing good.”

SKY.

That’s what my da would call the roof of stone and metal that stretched over our home in the mine of Lagalos. It’s what we all used to call it, going back generations of our clan to the first Pioneers. The sky be crumbling. The sky needs reinforcing.

It stretched over us like a great shield, keeping us safe from the fabled Martian storms raging outside. There were dances for the sky, songs wishing it luck and blessings. I even knew two lasses named for it.