Her smile looked more like a wince. “Well, it’s been quite a while since your photo ran, and you … don’t quite match it anymore. Still, I’d keep a low profile.”

“You aren’t,” he said, trying to decide if he recognized the pattern of the quilt she spread across the sofa. Family heirloom? Or newer acquisition?

“My situation’s a little more sympathetic than yours, I think.” She smoothed wrinkles from the quilt. “I didn’t hand the police over to the Ospies like a rotten key to the city.”

“Is that what the article said?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s what I read in your file when they told me you were dead and I’d end up the same if I didn’t play along.” She smacked his pillow, fluffing it. “The papers made it sound a little more tabletop.”

“Like?”

“‘Though he showed early promise brokering an understanding between Acherby’s government and the ACPD, DePaul nevertheless proved to be dangerously unreliable, owing his loyalty not to his country but to his own deviance.’ That kind of thing.”

When he asked what the Ospies had printed about her, she asked if she could turn the light off. He said yes, though he hadn’t undressed or even gotten under the covers.

They hadn’t spoken much at breakfast, or in the car on the way to Temple Street. When Lillian hit the slushy ground she was already on some other level, assembled to wage a charming war. Cyril became an afterthought, and he was grateful for that. Standing at the edge of the crowd, he looked up and down Temple Street. It had always seemed a little seedy in the daytime, then, or at least out of its element. Now it just looked sad. That could have been the weight of winter dragging on the city, but he didn’t think so.

The speeches started—he heard applause, the squeal of a microphone—and he turned half-reluctantly from the damp, cold set piece of the street. No one he recognized. Nobody he could imagine Cordelia having known. Not even—Who was it? He’d been poking at the newspapers by the hearth last night, in the small hours when he couldn’t sleep. Saeger. Opal Saeger. Cordelia’s right hand, apparently. Old Catwalk folk, probably still smelled like cordite. The logical choice to speak at this half wake, half aggrandizement. Except she was running for prime minister, and the provisional government couldn’t appear to favor one candidate over the other.

She’d be here, though. Lillian had said as much at breakfast while she tiptoed around speaking directly to Cyril. Jinadh made a sarcastic remark in Porashtu, and Lillian sighed and said, in a long-suffering tone, “I believe it translates as ‘brown-nosing,’” which was how Cyril learned his sister was after some attention from Saeger.