Winsome, collected, sixteen-year-old Zinyary Halkana was clearly the entire opposition’s mascot by this point. Tennal had to admire it. It wasn’t a tactic he could have used. One soldier even offered her their water flask in sympathy. The commander couldn’t reasonably deny her.

“And I’m not a captain,” Tennal said. “I’m a civilian.” He patted the commander’s shoulder as he passed. “Great to see you again, though. Keep up the good work.”

The commander needed to go down. Surit wouldn’t hold a grudge, but Tennal could. Two months ago Tennal wouldn’t have dreamed of ever managing to take down a senior military commander. Now, though, Tennal could see a different future. If you’d asked him what made normal people clean up their act, he wouldn’t have said spite, but if it worked, he’d take it.

He glanced at Surit, and at Zin, and at the unthinkable traces of combat soldiers in his aunt’s house. Maybe other factors had an influence as well.

When they emerged into the warm evening air of the garden, no longer quiet—some Infantry soldiers had set up a comms tent in the shrubbery—Zin said, “Tenn, I thought I was very restrained in there, but what in Lights’ gaze did you do?”

“We have solved your situation for you,” Tennal announced grandly.

“You haven’t!” Zin said. “You absolutely haven’t!”

“We have fucked up the situation,” Tennal amended, just as grandly, “in a new and interesting way.”

Zin finally cracked, crying and laughing at the same time. She collapsed to sit on a wall and took an enormous gulp of air. “Did you kill Governor Oma?”

“In our defense,” Tennal said, “she did very much try to kill us.”

“She’s not dead.” With Tennal’s help, Surit lowered himself carefully to sit on the wall a few feet away. “Excuse me, Sen Zinyary. Her body is. But we think her mind … escaped somewhere. Possibly somewhere outside the sector. I hope her victims are recovering—she was brainwashing hundreds of people.”

“Oh, wow, great,” Zin said, in a tone of voice Tennal suspected she’d gotten from him. “Big fan of that. Well, we got a flurry of messages from her officers about ten minutes ago. Something about compulsions. Were those the victims you meant? That was how we got the intel that she was here and why the other side fell apart. Did you know our aunt’s alive, by the way, Tenn? I could kill her myself.”

“Yes—” Tennal started to say.

LOCATED, a voice said. It was on a frequency that set Tennal’s whole nervous system on edge. It wasn’t a human voice, and it didn’t exactly come through his hearing. Surit flinched in shock. Zin clapped her hands over her ears.

And then others, like a clamor of discordant bells:

LOCATED.

LOCATED.

OPENING VISUAL.