“What’s not to miss?” she asks, giving me a sly smile. I move to sit with her on the chaise, but she clucks her tongue. “You’re not done yet. Keep rubbing, Imperator. Your Sovereign commands it.”
“I think power’s gone to your head.” She glances up at me. “Yes, ma’am.” I continue massaging her neck.
“I’m drunk,” she mutters. “I can already feel the hangover.”
“Thraxa’s good at making it feel like a moral obligation to keep pace.”
“Ten credits says we have to scrape Sevro off the patio tomorrow.”
“Poor Goblin. All spirit, no body mass.”
She laughs. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actually get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a few years.”
She pats the cushion beside her. I join her on the chaise and wrap my arms around her. The lake breeze sighs through the trees. In the silence we share, I feel her heartbeat and wonder what her eyes see as they look out over the tops of the trees to the orange sky.
“Dancer was here,” I say.
She makes a small noise of acknowledgment, to let me know she resents my reminder of the world beyond our balcony. “He’s not happy with you.”
“Half the Senate looked like they wanted to poison my wine.”
“I warned you. Luna’s changed since you were gone. The Vox Populi can’t be ignored any longer.”
“I noticed.”
“Yet when they passed a resolution, you spat in their eye.”
“And now they’ll spit in mine.”
“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.
But the sky wasn’t a shield. It was a lid. A cage.
I was sixteen years of knobby knees and freckles when I first saw the true sky. Took six years from the death of the Sovereign on Luna for the Rising to push the last of the Golds off our continent of Cimmeria. Two more years for them to finally free our mine from the Gray warlord who set up his own little kingdom in their absence.
Then the Rising came to Lagalos.
Our saviors looked more like manic Laureltide jesters than soldiers draped with trophies of gray and blond hair and iron pyramid badges. SlingBlades and spiked red helmets were painted on their chests. And standing at their front was a weary, bearded Red man old enough to be a grandfather. He had a large gun in one hand and in the other a tattered white flag with the fourteen-pointed morning star. He wept when he saw the bloated bellies and skeletal evidence of our starvation under the Gray warlord. His gun dropped to the floor, and though he was a stranger to us, he came forward and hugged me. “Sister,” he said. Then he hugged the man beside me. “Brother.”