They make love all night, lighting the entire city with a preternatural passion that is the sole engine of their brief existence, never with the slightest awareness of the gift they’re giving to the citizenry. After a month they wither to ash, from which their offspring rise and begin the cycle anew. With very little maintaining, each lamp and its inhabitants can light the night for years.

Lexi often reflects upon how it’s all quite beautiful, if one chooses not to focus on the whole “incest” aspect of it.

We are not flowers. We do not wilt.

Those are her mother’s words, spoken to her from a room in Lexi’s mind where she keeps the memory of the woman as she was.

It’s very different from the final room in which Lexi saw her. It’s a room in which the air doesn’t smell like death. Her mother sits there with her head raised high and proud, not pressed into a pillow, its slip stained brown by the poison expelled from her lungs. In that room in Lexi’s mind, her mother’s hair shines three different fiery colors in the light of the midday sun, hues for which they made up names when Lexi was a child. The day Lexi’s mother died, what remained of that hair was a few wisps gone gray that moved against her scalp like lonely spirits in bone-white graveyard.

On that day, her last words to her only daughter were the same ones she’d spoken to the girl whenever strife crashed in heavy slate waves over their lives.

The great stone doors to the Gen Franchise Council chambers open, somehow without the slightest scraping sound, and an elderly Aegin pokes his graying head through.

“Lexi Xia!” he calls out.

Lexi rises from the building’s translucent appendage and smooths the colorful material of the formal wrap she wears. The Aegin steps aside, bowing mechanically and with the disinterest of many years spent opening and closing a door, as Lexi moves past him.

The Council chamber is essentially one long ascending staircase with several spacious plateaus, the first and lowest of which is assigned to petitioners. Brio always told Lexi the chambers were built this way to achieve two effects. The first, giving petitioners the illusion they are rising in status, but only so far. That illusion is central to the second effect; looking up at the next plateau, seeded high above them, they accept that the state officials are their superiors in every way.

Brio also told her the most dangerous people in Crache, according to the Spectrum, are the ones who look to that handmade horizon and see a beginning rather than an ending. Lexi once asked him if he was one of those people. Her husband had only smiled and shrugged and professed that he was a simple pleader, and for the poorest people in the Capitol.