“I fucked up,” the legislator said brutally. “I never thought Hsanan Oma would go that far, and I’ve paid for it, and so have troops I valued. Don’t get me wrong, though—there will be a reckoning. This is a coup. We are at war.” She looked at Tennal’s expression and said, “Did you think I was some kind of master manipulator?”

Tennal took a breath that was, for some reason, difficult. “I think you’re a politician.”

Talking to his aunt had always been like a fistfight: if you didn’t get your next words in quickly enough, that left you open for a counterpunch. Tennal was used to that. He wasn’t used to this, where his aunt paused before she answered, as if what Tennal said deserved consideration.

“I’m a soldier, Tennalhin,” his aunt said, “and Orshan has always been a battlefield.”

Tennal was, he found, still furious. “No! That’s no Lights-lost excuse. You can make world-weary pronouncements about the nature of power all day long; you tried to murder Surit.”

His aunt looked blank.

“Surit Yeni. Lieutenant Yeni!” He could hear his own voice raise. “Your expendable Rank One that you sent to die in space. To make me into an architect. Did you even know what you had in him?”

“Your architect,” his aunt said, as if just reaching that conclusion. She didn’t even have the grace to look remorseful. “Where is he?”

“He cut our sync.”

The legislator paused as if she had been presented with something genuinely unexpected. “Ah.”

Tennal’s fury reached incandescence. “Yes, Auntie, ah. You tried to sacrifice him to fix me. He was your soldier!”

“And you’re my family,” his aunt said, with all the warmth of a granite cliff.

It took Tennal like a blow to the lungs. “Wow,” he said, cresting on a wave of disbelief, “you’re worse than me.”

“I raised you,” the legislator said brusquely. “And do you know what? From the time you were fourteen up until now, I had a front-row seat to the way you turned every single one of your destructive urges on yourself. It was brutal. It was like launching a brand-new, fresh-off-the-line warship and watching it fire all its shells at its own hull. For bloody years.”

Tennal opened his mouth then shut it again. Then he said, “That wasn’t because I was a reader.”

“Maybe not all of it,” the legislator said. “But it was part of the problem. You scorched the earth with all your therapists, and the civilian medics want six forms of patient consent before they do their bloody jobs. What options did I have left?”

“What options?” Tennal said. “What options? How many options did you go down before you picked sacrificing a bystander?”

She sat there with an expression like stone, unmoving and unrepentant. Tennal didn’t know what he’d been expecting to get from her. He was like a child shouting at—