They were traitors, both of them. One who’d scarred me, one who’d become me. They’d tried to make the Hopebearer speak words she could never—not without being untrue to the Mira Treaty—and they’d both fooled me into thinking they were my friends.

They were my enemies.

And yet, seeing them here, I couldn’t hate them. I couldn’t celebrate that they were now in the high magistrate’s hands. I could only wish that they weren’t, because neither of them deserved what he would do to them.

“This is an insult,” one of the matriarchs said. “Elbena is one of us. She should be up here.” She gestured toward the seats left open.

“Mira is just a child,” someone else said. “What have you been doing with her? Why is she being treated like this?”

I stared at that last speaker. I hadn’t felt like a child in a long time. Maybe ever. I’d been treated like a doll or a puppet, useful as nothing more than a face and a mouthpiece.

“She is no child.” The high magistrate’s expression was cool and impassive, as though the two standing below him meant nothing. As though they were nothing. “She is a relic of an old and dying world. She has no place in the new world we are creating.”

Tirta’s eyes went wide, and my heart jumped. She didn’t deserve this.

Aaru squeezed my arm.

Paorah gazed over the room, conviction lighting his eyes. “We cannot destroy the document of the Mira Treaty. That opportunity was already taken when rogue warriors attacked Crescent Prominence. But here we have the living symbol of the treaty. The Hopebearer.”

“What are you saying?” a man asked.

“We are putting aside the Mira Treaty.” The high magistrate stood, looming over the chamber as dark and frightening as Idris on the horizon. “We are embracing our new future.”

My heartbeat thundered in my ears, and I wanted to look away, but the scene below was a magnet, drawing me back every time I tried to pull free.

High Magistrate Paorah lifted an arm.

“Stop this!” cried one of the matriarchs. “Stop this at once!”

He called out, “Now!”

It all happened too quickly.

1. The pair of guards flanking Tirta and Elbena drew their knives.
2. My mother screamed.
3. Three warriors leaped over the desks, toward the floor, but they were too late.
4. The knives plunged into two soft throats.
5. Blood.
6. Someone grabbed Mother to hold her, but the screams kept coming.
7. The warriors met the guards on the floor, killing them with their bare hands, but more guards swarmed in.
8. And Tirta and Elbena dropped to the floor, lifeless.

The whole world tilted as my double died. A girl I’d thought was a friend. A girl I wanted to hate but couldn’t.

Paorah raised his voice over the cacophony of footfalls and screams. “You have a choice to make. Resist and die, or join me and live. But either way, know this:

“The Mira Treaty is dead.”