“Put it down, Franny. It’s not gonna do you any good.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A loud noise, some nasty stains — it would have a certain nostalgia value at the very least.” The room was cool, but there was a light gloss of sweat above Frances’s eyebrows.

“Huh. I thought they were the good old days. But I figured you’d got religion or something. All the fun we used to have, and here you are, with a self-righteous stick up your ass, out to blow my brains out for bein’ just as bad as you.” He took a step forward, grinning, teeth clenched intermittently. “And you know that’s true. I’ve never done anything you didn’t do.”

I’d heard that before, from Mick about Frances. She’d denied it. And I remembered what Tom Worecski’s death sentence was for. I must have moved; Tom’s gaze flicked to me and back to Frances.

“You didn’t tell anybody?” he said. “Oh, my. Let you who are without sin cast the first stone.”

Frances also grinned; like Tom, she seemed to be doing it at least half because of the pressure. “If I’d washed my sins away first, I wouldn’t have been able to minister to the rest of you.”

Tom snorted. “You loved it. You always figured you had a right to run the world. You thought being part of the committee that was gonna blow it to hell was no more than you deserved. You wanted to show those bastards who hadn’t had the sense to get together and elect you Goddess.”

“That’s not true.” Frances spoke without heat, as if he’d misstated the time and she was correcting that. But the heat was there, underneath, unspoken, a slow tide of it. “You had to lie to get me to sign on. You never once planned to hold the country hostage, but I believed it. I thought I was working for peace. I may have been criminally stupid and blind as a cave fish, but I didn’t think we meant to actually drop the Big One.”

“Shit, Franny, then you were the only one.”

“A loner to the very end.” Her right hand was trembling, barely.

“Is it true?” Tom asked the air. “Was she really pure as the driven snow, even though she executed half the damn launch sequence her own self?”

“We were supposed to hold and wait to abort,” Frances snapped, her face white. Some of it was surely whatever Tom was doing to her head. But she looked like a woman watching a rerun of her worst nightmare. She had done it. She had lived with it all these decades. And she’d dedicated herself to seeing that the people who’d shared the blame wouldn’t live with anything anymore. I’d been right all the time, to be afraid of her.

“I’ll bet the jury’s done deliberating,” Tom said. “Awful sorry I couldn’t get twelve of ’em, but one good one oughta be enough for this. Whattaya say, Skin? Innocent or guilty?”