Or they could instead go with the existing bill. And also go about their lives unburdened by inconvenient, embarrassing disruptions.

The amendment had been scrapped, and UpLink’s regulatory approvals given easy passage through the Assembly.

What Assele-Ndaki and his friend had failed to grasp—what none of the amendment’s sponsors had understood at the time—was that they were in greater jeopardy of being rolled over by the inexorable force that had driven them on until that point. The blanc would tolerate nothing but their moving forward once they had committed to his agenda, would simply plow them down in their tracks if they dared halt or turn back.

Now Assele-Ndaki felt his skin prickle. Beads of sweat slicked his forehead, gleamed on the broad slopes of his cheekbones. Macie. Poor Macie . . .

He had been murdered. Made a gruesome example. Inquiry and scandal were the tools of politicians. And the blanc was not that.

Assele-Ndaki shuddered, staring at the photo of Macie on his knees with the blazing necklace around his shoulders. Macie burning like a human candle, his face contorted in dying agony behind licks of gasoline-charged flame. Macie burning with his hands cut off at the wrists, dropped on the ground where he could see them as the fire rose around him and the life broiled from his flesh.

An example, Assele-Ndaki thought again.

Though numb with shock, he retained full command of his instincts for self-preservation. Examples were by very definition meant to serve as warnings, and he would not have been sent the photograph if it was too late for him to avoid sharing Macie’s fate. There was still a chance the telecommunications legislation could be defeated, or become so deeply mired in the parliamentary process that the net result was the same. While it had cleared the National Assembly, its ratification would require Senát passage, normally a rubber stamp vote to satisfy the president’s will. But Assele-Ndaki had many confederates, some of them quietly aware of the blanc’s maneuvers. If the venerable senateurs ruled to overturn the bill after their chamber deliberations—if enough of them could be persuaded to vote against it—it would be kicked back down to the lower parliamentary house and resubmitted to committee for changes. Then the amendments could be reintroduced, the process for all practical intents and purposes started from the beginning.

Assele-Ndaki’s heart was racing. It was a plan of abject fear and desperation, he knew. All those who undercut the president would pay the consequences. They would be probed, censured—their personal reputations impugned, their careers in government run into the dirt. Some stood to lose everything. Were Assele-Ndaki’s wife to learn of his own extramarital proclivities—

Everything, yes, the amendment’s proponents would lose everything.

Except their lives.

Assele-Ndaki gazed at the photo of Macie in his smoking ruff of flame and felt a fresh bout of horror and grief.

Better to walk in disgrace than suffer death. Especially that kind of death.