“My boss,” said Quint, while I struggled to find my feet, “believes we have misunderstood your fundamental motivations.”

“What is it this time?” I asked, enunciating carefully. “Wine and women?”

“You’re charged with attempted murder.” Quint was rapping her knuckles against the edge of the desk, and not meeting my gaze. “If you had killed that cop, you could’ve escaped. You wouldn’t be here now.”

She raised her head. I looked into her eyes, trying to find hatred or pity or something, some connection between the two of us, but I didn’t see anything except discomfort.

She said, “You’ll tell the Republic to go to Hell, but you won’t let someone die right in front of you.”

And then Quint looked at Benny.

“If you don’t accept, Sean, neither Leah or I can go.” Benny had his arms crossed over his chest. When Quint did it, she looked like she was hugging herself; when Benny did it, he seemed to be restraining himself. “Then we’ll all be dead. Do you know what he’s put inside our heads?”

I halted, words tumbling over each other against the closure of my throat. Only one found its way out: “What?”

“He’s put a bomb inside our heads. The damn Senator.” Benny shook with anger; I could see the tremor in his shoulders. “Tiny little thing, right at the base of our spines. If it blows it’ll take our brains with it. And he’ll push the button unless we all agree to go.”

CHAPTER SIX:

The Imp of the Perverse

My mother called it the imp of the perverse. By the way she’d told it, she’d spent my childhood stopping me from jumping off cliffs or sticking my hand into fires. I’d been an indifferent student, only working at things that interested me, and talking back to whoever tried to tell me otherwise. I can pick up a new language in a week but I can’t do any math past algebra. Detention had been an ordinary part of school.

That was where I’d been, a little over eight years ago, when the Ministers arrived. At school late, not at home with my mother and father and sister. That was why I’d lived and they hadn’t. I’d arrived at my parents’ home a few hours after the Ministers came to Kystrom and immediately fell upon my hometown Itaka, the largest city on the planet, slaughtering every living thing they found as a show of might.

I’d stumbled out of my parents’ house some endless time after I’d arrived, while Minister ships still wheeled overhead, glinting many colors in the slowly sinking sun. I’d found Benny, covered in ash, the same stricken look in his eyes as I felt in mine.

“They’re dead,” I’d said to him as we came together like magnets in the street, the last living things from home.

His eyes had been haunted, shockingly white against the ash on his skin. “I know,” he’d said.

Somehow, I’d thought he hadn’t understood. “Brigid is dead,” I said. My sister was gone.