“Victory?” I said. I wanted to draw upon my fear, my outrage, my horror at what he was doing, but I felt as though my heart had been set adrift in empty space, with nothing to knock against, nothing to fall into. I could hear shouts in the background, cries and screams of fear, a man bellowing for others to stay on the floor. The people aboard Homestead knew what was coming, and they were afraid. “This is not victory, Adam. You promised to protect the family, but you’re killing them.”

“We are ending our lives in defiance and strength,” he retorted. “We are finally free of the crushing boot of the oppressors. We will be remembered forever as the only people courageous enough to defy the liars and deceivers. There was never going to be a way back from this. This is where we were always going to end.”

Behind him one of the old women—Rosalinda, a kindly grandmother to everybody in the family—was shushing the weeping children.

“Do you even care about all the children who are going to die?” I asked.

“We make sacrifices,” Adam spat, his pale face turning red. “Nobody has sacrificed more than I. You dare scold me about the hardships we have endured on our path to victory? They would not have to die if you had done as you were told.”

“No,” I said, my voice drawing down as his shouts rang. “They would not have to die if you were anything more than a coward.”

Adam scowled. “Your father was a weak slave of the Councils, and you are as weak as he was. You have always been weak. You have always cowered and groveled when a stronger person would have fought. You relished every chance I gave you to bend and kiss my feet.”

“This is betrayal,” I said. “This is worse than failure. Nobody will remember you as anything other than a monster. They will remember you exactly as you deserve.”

“Your cowardice has never shown more than now,” he said, his voice spiked with a disdain that would have crushed me only days ago.

“No,” I said. He would not hear me, but I was not speaking to him. I was speaking to Nadra and Anwar, to Rosalinda and the others, to myself, if only to prove I still could, here at the end. “What you are doing is cowardice. I am only trying to keep you from hurting more people.”