“I should have known.” Maya stepped forward, haken raised, flames crackling in front of her. “You as good as told me you were a traitor to humanity. I should have …” She shook her head.

His expression hardened. “Should have what? Killed me? Thrown me in in a cell? Probably.” He sidestepped away from the crater and Tanax, and Maya moved to match him, beginning a slow circle. “That’s what a good Order slave would have done, isn’t it? Judge, jury, and executioner all in one.” He extended his silver blade like an accusing finger. “What gives you the right?”

“We are carrying out the duty left to us by the Chosen,” Maya said. “It’s not a right. It’s a responsibility.”

“You’re the enforcers for a gang of corpses,” Gyre said. “Dogs keeping the flock in line, even though the shepherds are dead and gone.”

Maya raised her hand and smothered him with a gout of flame. Not hard or hot enough to kill—she wasn’t ready for that, even now—but it ought to have blown him off his feet. Instead, when the fire cleared, Gyre was unmoved, silver sword extended without a tremble.

“Of course,” he said. “That’s the Order’s answer to everything, isn’t it? Just burn it, break it, smash it until it can’t talk back anymore.” He slashed his blade, real eye blazing, silver eye still glowing that eerie green. “You know, I never met a Chosen. Maybe they really did deserve to run the world. Maybe they were better than us—smarter, more moral, superior. But you centarchs are only human, with a little fizz in your blood. Just because you can kill anyone who disagrees, that means you have the right to rule?”

Maya thought of Nicomidi, glaring down at her in her cell, casually threatening to have Beq killed. The rest of the Council, broken into warring camps, willing to turn a blind eye to anything that hurt their political enemies. Raskos Rottentooth, representing the Republic and the Order, feeding off the misery of thousands to stuff his coffers. She took a deep breath.

“We’re all only human,” she said. “Centarchs as much as anyone. But the centarchs aren’t the Twilight Order, and neither are the Auxiliaries or the duxes. The Order is a principle. That those with power should defend those without.”

“Defend them by swaddling them. Keeping them like infants, without any way to defend themselves, because that might mean they can stand up to you.”

“And what exactly are you offering?” Maya shouted, gesturing with her haken at the vast bulk of the monstrous plaguespawn. “That?”

“That is the power to overturn the order of the world,” Gyre said. But there was a moment of hesitation in his voice; she was certain of it.

“Please, Gyre. Stop this.”