“Not from Hades, Edward,” the countess said patiently. “Away from a profoundly painful personal choice she wasn’t prepared to make. As Steadholder Harrington, it was clearly and unambiguously her responsibility to return to Grayson and her duties there as soon as humanly possible. What’s more, she had to have realized that whether or not the Admiralty could have scraped up the shipping for a mass prisoner evacuation from the Cerberus System, the Graysons damned well would have sent at least one ship. For that matter, they would have dragged her aboard it at gunpoint, if necessary, if they’d known she was alive and where to find her! But if they’d done that, her public duty as Steadholder Harrington would have pulled her away from a personal duty to all of the prisoners on the planet. She was not only unprepared to turn her back on that responsibility but literally couldn’t force herself to ‘abandon’ them, whatever she knew she ought to have done. So whether she realized it or not, her decision not to inform anyone in the Alliance of what was happening on Hades while she tried to somehow capture or steal enough personnel lift to pull everyone out was a deliberate evasion of something which was too painful for her even to contemplate.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Janacek said slowly, and Lady North Hollow shrugged.

“I’m not surprised, Edward. For that matter, I doubt very much that Harrington ever thought of it that way. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. Which is the reason she didn’t think about it. But the reason this particular character flaw is important to us at this particular moment is that it gives us a possible handle to maneuver her in the way we want.”

“How?” High Ridge asked, frowning intensely.

“The key here is that she won’t evade anything unless there’s an ‘honorable’ way to do it,” the countess said. “She may be able to rationalize her way into choosing a way out from among several possible courses of action, but not simply to save herself. There has to be a reason. There has to be something that needs doing, and that she can be convinced—or that she can convince herself—is also her responsibility. Give her an honorable task, a responsibility, especially one that’s likely to demand some sacrifice on her part, and the odds are considerably better than even that she’ll take it.”

“What sort of ‘responsibility’ did you have in mind?” Descroix arched an eyebrow. “Personally, I can’t think of a single thing Harrington would feel compelled to do for any of us—except, perhaps, to pump a little more hydrogen into the furnaces in Hell while we roasted over them!”

“Actually,” Reginald Houseman said, speaking up for the first time, “I believe we may have just the job for her. In fact, it’s rather like one she was offered once before. She accepted that one, and it almost killed her.”

He smiled with an ugly vengefulness he would never have allowed any other audience, and especially not his fellow Liberals, to see.