Oxham smiled. Throughout the conversation, she had thought of Zai as unsophisticated, never having met a pink. Perhaps that was true, but how many actual grays had she herself spoken with honestly and openly? Perhaps her assumptions had been, in their own way, unsophisticated.

Zai raised an eyebrow at her expression.

“I was just thinking: Perhaps minds can be changed,” she offered.

“Without death to drive the process?” Zai asked.

She nodded.

He took a deep breath, and his eyes drifted away from her. For a moment, she thought he was using synesthesia. But then some glimmer of intuition told Oxham that he was looking deeper than second sight.

“Or perhaps,” Laurent Zai said, “I am already dead.”

Something took hold of Nara. She felt an impossible moment of empathy, as if the drug had somehow failed: far inside the man was a terror, a wound opened by the depth of evil he had seen. It cut like an arctic wind, like an old fear made undeniably physical. It was agony and hopelessness. And, quite suddenly, she hated the Emperor for pinning a medal on this man.

Rewarding, rather than healing him.

“How much of Home have you seen, Laurent?” she asked quietly.

He shrugged. “The capital. This palace. And soon I will meet the Emperor himself. More than most of the risen see in centuries of pilgrimage.”

“Would you like to see the South Pole?”

He looked genuinely surprised.

“I didn’t know it was inhabited.”

“Hardly. Outside a few estates, the poles are arid, freezing, dead. But I am pro-death, as you know. My new house there is surrounded by a glorious wasteland. I intend to escape the pressures of the capital there.”

Zai nodded. He must know of her condition. The Mad Senator, the grays called her. A woman driven insane by crowds and cities, yet who made politics her profession.

The man swallowed before he spoke.

“I would like to see that, Senator.”

“Then come with me there tomorrow, Lieutenant-Commander.”

He raised his glass. “To a glorious wasteland.”

“A truly gray place,” she answered.

2

Rescue Attempt

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

—ANONYMOUS 81

Senator

She awoke without sanity.

The temporal ice released her quickly. Its lattice of tiny interwoven stasis fields unraveled, and time rushed back into her body like water through a suddenly crumbling dam, inundating a valley long denied it. Her mind became aware, emerging as it always did from coldsleep, raw and unprotected from the raging mindstorm of the city.

She awoke to madness.