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  GENTIUS’ STATEROOM, SHERAMDA ORBITAL SPACEPORT

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  The holographic projection of Emperor Anu materialized above Gentius’s console table, the circular Imperial Command Nexus visible behind him, its walls rising in graceful spirals toward a domed ceiling alive with real-time feeds from across the empire. Aferdita watched as her father’s posture straightened slightly.

  Anu stood on the command dais, a raised platform of living crystal hovering two meters above the chamber floor. He sat, the crystal forming a seat beneath him, then immediately stood again, that characteristic kinetic restlessness, consciousness too expansive to remain at rest even within his imposing frame.

  His form radiated a luminosity that earned the Anunnaki elite their ancient epithet, “The Shining Ones.” This glow came from millennia of consuming monoatomic gold and other alchemical compounds that sustained the Abra’ah state of physical immortality, preserving a physique that lesser beings would have long since surrendered. His skull extended backward in the characteristic elongated Anunnaki profile, more pronounced than in most members of his race. Piercing sapphire eyes swept across them both. Even across interstellar distances, the atmosphere itself seemed to compress under the weight of his consciousness.

  Lord el Sibar. Lady Aferdita. The Emperor’s telepathic signature carried the accumulated authority of hundreds of thousands of years. Your emergency communication indicates developments requiring Imperial attention. Report.

  Emperor, Gentius responded with appropriate mental deference, we have contacted you because events on Shamhdi have moved with dangerous speed. Within the last twenty-four standard hours, a coup has overthrown every progressive human government across the Aurinko system. The Cabal struck simultaneously, eliminating our primary human contacts in a coordinated action. Queen Kalevala faces house arrest. King Suryavar battles rebel forces within his own military. General Mihajlo and his staff have been executed.

  Gentius paused, allowing the magnitude of those losses to sink in before continuing.

  Prince Vuk contacted us after the coup. He demands the surrender of the entire Aurinko system across all parallel realities to Draconian control. He has set a three-month deadline.

  Anu paced the length of the dais, stopped, paced again. His eyes sharpened with each piece of intelligence, a predator focusing on a threat.

  There is further development, Emperor, Aferdita interjected, her mental voice steady. The Shamhdi human collective consciousness has reached out. They have proposed direct intervention, manifesting Anne Reynolds as a physical presence on Shamhdi in a parallel existence where the Cabal has not yet taken control. Anne’s manifestation there, with abilities that would seem supernatural to the local population, could suppress the Cabal before it executes a strike it has here. We assess that stabilizing at least one world preserves Imperial interests in cerauniam extraction and may eventually be extended across other realities.

  The Emperor paused his restless movement.

  A deviation from the protocols established by the Intergalactic Confederation for managing subject populations,Anu observed, his mental tone carrying neither approval nor rejection; the deliberate neutrality of a sovereign weighing all options before committing.

  The circumstances are unprecedented, Emperor, Aferdita replied. We face destabilization across multiple reality streams. The Cabal's purge has neutralized standard management protocols.

  Anu sat again upon his living crystal throne, then stood. His gaze moved between them across the interstellar distance, that piercing blue scrutiny probing for what remained unspoken.

  Aferdita held his stare, her expression composed. Beside her, Gentius did the same.

  Neither mentioned Jason Reynolds.

  Anu’s luminous form shifted on the dais; he stood, turned, and looked to something beyond their sight. His physical restlessness stilled in a way that drew Aferdita’s attention more sharply than his usual kinetic energy.

  Your losses among the human leadership are significant, he projected, his modulation carrying the weight of someone processing information across multiple dimensional frequencies simultaneously. But before I address Vuk’s ultimatum and your proposed response, I require answers to a different question.

  Aferdita exchanged a glance with her father. Gentius’s bearing held that particular calm she recognized from years of watching him in Imperial chambers; the patience of someone who had spent millennia navigating exactly this kind of courtly terrain, who had learned that emperors revealed their true concerns only when they chose to, and not a moment before.

  Someone within our command structure has been feeding operational intelligence to the Draconians. Anu’s eyes swept back toward them. The methods used to attack Anne Reynolds, the schedule of her psychic transmissions to Shamhdi, your planned meeting with our human proxies at Sheramda. Draconian scout vessels repositioned to optimal surveillance positions at exactly the moment Anne began her latest transmission sequence. These are not coincidences.

  Aferdita kept her disposition level. The transmission schedule had only been shared with the High Council.

  The leak— Gentius projected with measured care, not operational staff. Higher. Council level. Information distributed at the last session to seven members only. Seven.

  You believe the leak comes from the High Council itself? Anu’s signature contracted; hope draining from frequencies that had carried warmth moments before.

  We do, Emperor, Aferdita confirmed. The information regarding Anne’s transmission schedule was shared only at the last Council session.

  Anu resumed his pacing, slower now, each step deliberate. When he spoke again, his expression carried the grim certainty of someone confirming what he had long suspected.

  Prince Enlil. My son has been conspicuously absent from Council proceedings for the past month. Claims of security force reviews in the outer territories. Inspection tours that coincidentally prevent him from responding to summons regarding Aurinko matters.

  The Emperor turned toward something outside their view. A priority communication signal, Aferdita surmised, visible only to him.

  It appears Enlil has finally deigned to respond to my summons. His eyes returned to them, the phosphorescent glow of his form brightening. Stay connected to this transmission. You will witness this conversation.

  The display split.

  Prince Enlil materialized beside his father’s projection, nearly four meters of hybrid power, making even his father seem slight by comparison. That distinctive pale brown skin flushed darker across his cheekbones; yellow eyes with their vertical reptilian pupils sweeping the transmission field and fixing upon Gentius with the undisguised loathing.

  Father. Enlil’s voice dripped venom beneath formal courtesy. You summoned me with such urgency that I had to abandon critical military operations. I trust this interruption serves the Empire’s interests.

  Anu’s restless movement stopped. He stood on the dais, motionless in a way that made stillness feel threatening.

  Critical military operations, Anu repeated, his tone carrying dangerous softness. Would these be the operations coordinating Draconian intelligence on the Aurinko system? Or perhaps the operations ensuring Cabal forces received precise timing for their purges on Shamhdi?

  Enlil’s pupils dilated, a Ciakahrr physiological response to threat that his hybrid biology could not fully suppress.

  I have no idea what you’re implying, Emperor. The formal title carried barely concealed insolence. My operations concern legitimate defense preparations in territories that rightfully belong to the Anakh Empire, unlike certain peripheral systems where Imperial resources are being squandered on impractical experiments in human management.

  The contempt in human management was familiar to Aferdita. She had heard it from High Council reactionaries for decades. Enlil’s error was not his premise—that humans needed strict control—but his stubborn refusal to see that brute subjugation was less effective than cultivated compliance. Sentiment had nothing to do with it. Economics did.

  Rightfully belong, Anu echoed. His eyes burned brighter. Tell me, my son, who do you believe the Aurinko system rightfully belongs to?

  To the Ciakahrr, Enlil shot back, dropping all pretense. It had been under Draconian rule for seven thousand years before el Sibar’s deceitful seizure. His yellow glare flicked to Gentius with open contempt, then briefly to Aferdita before returning to Anu. Before that insufferable poet and her father convinced you that coddling the rabble was sound Imperial policy.

  He stepped forward within the holographic space, his bearing shifting fully to aggression.

  The Aurinko system’s cerauniam deposits belong to my mother’s people. Humans exist to serve their masters. And your tolerance of el Sibar’s liberation schemes is the kind of strategic mistake that will cost this Empire much more than one star system.

  Aferdita held herself still, her face closed. Beside her, Gentius’s eyes rested on Enlil with the patient focus of someone watching an opponent overextend.

  And now I learn from my mother that el Sibar’s approach has metastasized into something far more dangerous: actual plans for universal abolition throughout the Empire. Not a regional experiment in more efficient resource extraction, Father.

  Anu’s phosphorescence intensified until the projection could scarcely contain it. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, a physical show of rage. Aferdita had never seen anything like it while observing the Emperor in Council chambers and private audiences.

  Your mother’s people. Anu’s voice carried the weight of fury barely leashed. You dare invoke territorial claims while secretly feeding Imperial reports to Draconian forces? While devising attacks against projects I have personally authorized?

  Projects you were maneuvered into authorizing, Enlil snarled back, his pupils contracting to thin slits. By el Sibar’s arguments about sustainable governance models and long-term Imperial stability. By that poet’s talent for dressing concessions to inferior races in the language of inevitable progress.

  His demeanor radiated contempt.

  I watched you at the High Council, Father. Watched you negotiate with the Intergalactic Confederation as if they had authority over how we manage our own subjects. Watched you transform from the emperor who built this civilization into one who measures Imperial policy against the moral standards of lesser species.

  Beside her, Gentius remained still, though the line of his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Aferdita kept her own expression composed. Enlil was not wrong about the Confederation; she found their interventions as irritating as he did. Where he was wrong was in his analysis of what the situation required.

  You speak of treason, Anu’s voice dropped to lethal softness, as you committed it. You invoke your Ciakahrr heritage while violating the very treaty agreements that alliance was built on. I specifically forbade military coordination with Queen Tia regarding the Aurinko system.

  A prohibition, Enlil shot back, that serves el Sibar interests while undermining our family’s treaty obligations. That abandons productive territories and the slaves working them to satisfy the Confederation’s interference in internal Imperial affairs.

  He stepped forward, glowering.

  The words landed like a blade between them.

  Ancient pain crossed Anu’s face: older than strategy, older than empire. Aferdita had watched this being across millennia of Imperial audiences, and she had never seen it. His son had spoken his deepest fear aloud and given it to their enemies.

  You discussed Imperial policy with your mother. Anu’s intonation had lost all its fury, revealing a steely resolve. You took what you heard in Council chambers to Queen Tia.

  Enlil’s chin rose. He offered no denial.

  She read the shift in her father’s face. His eyes held the distant quality she knew from moments when he stepped back from the immediate and read the larger shape of events. Whatever came next, they were no longer witnesses to a family argument. They were observing a fracture that had been widening for centuries, finally splitting open.

  Enlil’s face darkened. His form expanded, shoulders squaring as Ciakahrr combat physiology engaged.

  You’re considering—Father, the disruption alone—thousands of systems. Every slave population watching. Waiting. You understand what this means?

  The labor of subjects is not a minor policy we can abandon to appease the Confederation’s interference. It is the economic foundation of our civilization. We once controlled most of this galaxy, with reach extending into the Local Group. Today, millennia of pressure from the Orion and Draconian Empires have reduced our territory to one-third of what it once was. And yet, you propose dismantling the productive infrastructure supporting what remains.

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  Aferdita tracked him across the transmission field, her expression unreadable. She had run those projections herself in the early years of the Shamhdi design. The numbers Enlil cited were accurate. The conclusion was the error.

  My mother understands the strategic reality you have apparently chosen to ignore. Your experiment in the Aurinko system, which allows humans to organize politically, grants them administrative roles, and treats their governance preferences as constraints on Imperial resource extraction, is not a regional pilot program. It signals to the Empire's subjugated inhabitants that the old order can be negotiated away. That patience and organization produce results that resistance never could.

  Ideological contagion. Not territory.

  A discrepancy sharpened as Enlil’s words landed. He had just confirmed the distinction that mattered; conflicts over territory could be negotiated. Ideological threats required extermination.

  Aferdita watched Anu go utterly motionless; not the stillness of restraint but of realignment. His eyes remained fixed on his son with the expression of someone who had endured betrayals over hundreds of millennia and learned to accept them without flinching.

  What has Queen Tia told you? The softness in Anu’s voice was icy.

  Enlil’s pupils dilated slightly. Something moved behind those yellow pupils, the suspended moment of a being deciding whether to give something away. Then his chin lifted.

  My mother has mobilized the Ciakahrr Command Council. He could not suppress the satisfaction bleeding through his formal tone. They recognize that your Aurinko experiment, if it succeeds, will provide a template the enslaved masses across the Empire will study and emulate. The Ciakahrr will not allow that precedent to stand.

  Enlil’s eyes locked on Gentius, his pupils narrowing into predatory slits.

  The Council has authorized an assault to recapture the Aurinko system before this contagion spreads further. My mother reports that Draconian shipyards have been operating at maximum capacity for the past year. They are assembling a fleet of ten thousand capital ships for the offensive.

  The number occupied the space between them.

  Ten thousand. Enlil repeated it with savage delight. Dreadnoughts, heavy cruisers, carrier groups. A force sufficient to overwhelm any defensive position you could establish around the Aurinko system. Sufficient to ensure that when they reclaim that territory, no amount of el Sibar maneuvering will prevent it.

  Beside Aferdita, her father absorbed this without any visible response. No shift in posture, no alteration in his attention. Only someone who had observed Gentius el Sibar across thousands of years would recognize the micro-adjustment at the corner of his jaw; the focus of a mind reclassifying a threat from serious to existential, and proceeding anyway.

  Aferdita ran the numbers. Ten thousand capital ships represented a Draconian commitment that dwarfed anything deployed against the Aurinko system during the last invasion. Vuk’s underground force on Shamhdi, the Cabal’s infiltration of human governments, and the purge of progressive human leadership; all of it resolved into its true shape. Not separate crises requiring separate responses. A synchronized strategy, years in preparation, now moving toward its culmination.

  And Enlil had delivered that message himself, in front of Anu, to her father, with the triumphant assurance of someone who believed the outcome already decided.

  He thinks we’re finished, Aferdita understood. He told us because he believes it no longer matters what we know.

  Anu looked between them with the slow deliberation of a mind weighing consequences across centuries, not hours. The frantic restlessness had left him. Whatever deliberation occupied him now required composure.

  Enlil remained within the holographic space, eyes bright with satisfaction.

  Aferdita read Anu’s face and read nothing. After millennia of Imperial audiences, she had learned that his expressions seldom revealed more than he chose.

  Lord el Sibar. Anu’s voice was deliberate, stripped of ornamentation. You mentioned earlier that the Shamhdi human collective has proposed a direct alternative. Restate it for the record of this transmission.

  Gentius’s eyes moved briefly to Enlil before returning to the Emperor.

  The collective has offered to restructure the metaphysical agreements governing a parallel reality stream where our proxy governments remain intact, Gentius projected. Within that stream, the Cabal has not yet executed its purge. The collective proposes granting Anne Reynolds capabilities that would appear supernatural to Shamhdi’s population, allowing her to lead progressive Mestari forces and the Orja in direct resistance against the reactionary faction and the Cabal’s network.

  How long would this approach require?

  They had run this calculation together before initiating this transmission. She knew what number he was going to say.

  Twelve months, Emperor. That is the minimum timeline to suppress the Cabal’s network in the alternative reality, consolidate the progressive governments, and establish the kind of stability that demonstrates the project’s strategic value beyond this system.

  Twelve months. Enlil’s derision broke across the transmission. While a Draconian armada assembles. While our territories bleed. You want to spend a year coddling slaves on a moon no one has ever heard of.

  Anu silenced him with a single look.

  Neither Gentius nor Aferdita responded. Enlil’s ridicule was not inaccurate in its facts, only in its conclusion about what those facts signified.

  Anu clasped his hands behind him, staring at something beyond the visible field. The silence stretched until Aferdita’s secondary mental track noted its duration: forty-three seconds. For an Anunnaki of his age, forty-three seconds of deliberate silence meant architecture, not hesitation.

  The choice before me, Anu projected at last, his voice carrying the flatness of a consciousness that had arrived at a decision and found it ugly from every angle, is this.

  He turned to face them fully.

  Commit the Anakh Empire’s forces to defend a peripheral system against a ten-thousand-ship fleet, triggering a galactic conflict whose scope neither I nor my advisors can predict. Or withdraw, cede the Aurinko system to Draconian control, and watch the Cabal’s model spread to every enslaved community in the Empire that has ever imagined liberation was possible.

  The Emperor’s attention moved to Enlil.

  Or pursue a third option that requires neither military commitment nor surrender. One that operates through a single human woman in a single universe, with no guarantee of success and no conventional logic to recommend it.

  Enlil’s pupils contracted.

  You can’t seriously be considering—

  I am. Anu’s voice did not rise. It did not need to.

  The image held only Anu’s breathing, and the distant hum of the Nexus walls behind him. Aferdita kept her face neutral. She was aware of her father’s motionlessness beside her, and the stateroom’s ambient hum, and the slow rotation of Sheramda’s storm bands in the viewport behind them. She registered all of it. None of it required her attention.

  Her father stood beside her, eyes fixed on Anu, giving nothing away.

  You will maintain defensive positions around the Aurinko Portal, the Emperor commanded, his movement resuming as decision resolved into action. Limited forces at key strategic points throughout the system. Anunnaki civilian evacuation from Genuvia begins immediately. All non-essential personnel withdrawn within two months.

  His frame turned toward where Enlil glowered.

  You will have three months, Lord el Sibar. Not twelve.

  The words landed with the weight of everything they were not. Aferdita held her composure with the discipline of sixty-five millennia. Three months. A quarter of what the operation required. Enough time to begin; nowhere near enough to finish.

  Three months, Enlil said, his voice carrying a hint of satisfaction where derision had been. Even the Emperor recognizes the limits of your population-management theories, el Sibar.

  Three months, Anu’s voice overrode him with the weight of absolute authority, is what Imperial strategic reality permits. The defensive forces will not engage the main Draconian fleet when it arrives. They are authorized only to delay and harass, gathering intelligence on their capabilities before withdrawal.

  His eyes intense.

  But they will collect that data. And they will extract maximum value from every engagement before abandoning the system. The Aurinko territory is not worth triggering wider galactic conflict, but neither will we surrender it without demonstrating that the Anakh Empire does not yield to threats without cost.

  As for Enlil, Anu’s demeanor was arctic; he will report to the Imperial Palace immediately. We will discuss his unauthorized coordination with Queen Tia, his violations of treaty protocols, and his apparent belief that family connection exempts him from the consequences of treason.

  Enlil’s form dissolved abruptly, his arrogant bearing collapsing into static, the connection severed. Only Anu’s projection remained.

  He committed no treason, from his own perspective, Aferdita thought privately. He committed conviction. She kept the observation out of the shared channel.

  Three months, Lord el Sibar, the Emperor said, his pacing slowing to almost exhaustion. Make them count. Because when the Draconian fleet arrives, tactical limitations will override all other considerations. I will not sacrifice the Empire’s territorial stability to maintain a governance experiment, however promising.

  As you command, Emperor, Gentius acknowledged.

  Anu’s form held for a long moment in the holographic field. His gaze held Gentius’s a moment longer than necessary.

  Do not waste my investment in you, old friend.

  His luminescence blazed once, sharp and bright.

  Then the projection faded away.

  * * *

  “Three months,” Aferdita said aloud, the spoken words landing differently than the telepathic exchange, more finite, more real.

  Her father’s amber eyes moved to her across the low table. “Three months,” he confirmed.

  Neither spoke for several heartbeats. Through the viewport, the gas giant’s storm bands spiraled in their slow, indifferent collisions, unconcerned with empires or armadas or the three months that now constituted the entire horizon of their project.

  Three months, Gentius finally projected through their private channel. A quarter of what we need.

  Less, Aferdita said. The parallel reality’s Cabal network will take at least eight months to dismantle, even under direct pressure from Anne’s manifestation. Within the Emperor’s deadline, we can destabilize their command structure. It does not allow us to replace it with anything durable.

  She traced the rim of her teacup, a habit she had when her thoughts moved faster than she wished to show.

  Then we do not try to replace it, Gentius said. He stood up and moved to the viewport. We use the time to position Anne, activate the human collective’s capabilities, and create conditions that make the situation irreversible in the alternate universe, whether or not we are present to manage it. Contact Bata through the higher frequencies. Inform her that Imperial authority has been granted. The human collective may provide Anne with the abilities they proposed.

  Aferdita joined him at the viewport.

  The Draconian fleet changes the strategic equation in this reality as well, she projected. Ten thousand capital ships. Even twelve months of effort in the parallel stream produces nothing that can deflect that kind of force.

  No, Gentius agreed. That means the Shamhdi project must do more than just preserve one reality. It must produce results enough to change the Emperor’s view of the system’s strategic value before the fleet arrives. Results he can’t dismiss as a governance experiment.

  He turned the problem over in silence, his face unreadable.

  Or it must create circumstances that transform the arithmetic entirely, making the Aurinko system too valuable to surrender, regardless of Draconian fleet strength.

  Aferdita understood. They were no longer running a stabilization operation in a parallel reality. They were racing a Draconian armada, using three months to accomplish what they had told the Emperor would take twelve, hoping to produce something spectacular enough to change his mind.

  Collaborate with Mirela and Colonel Hyseni, Gentius instructed. Accelerate the DNA activation timeline. If Anne is to manifest physically with enhanced capabilities, the human population’s receptivity must increase significantly to produce the desired effects within our compressed window.

  Gentius turned from the viewport.

  His amber eyes settled on her with a directness that stripped away every diplomatic layer of their audience with Anu, every careful word measured against Enlil's snarling projection. This was the face her father wore when the calculation was done.

  We need to find Jason Reynolds, she said. If Uziel’s description is correct, he’s an asset unlike any we’ve encountered.

  Agreed. Gentius moved to the low table and picked up his cold teacup. Uziel’s assessment was clear: through their connection, Jason could become the most powerful being in existence.

  Such power cannot be permitted to develop without direction, Gentius continued, his tone carrying the register she recognized from High Council chambers, not cruelty, but the absence of sentiment as a factor. Jason must either serve Anunnaki interests or be neutralized. There is no third option for an asset of this magnitude.

  Aferdita recognized the logic the way one recognizes a wall: solid, unarguable, and no less confining for it.

  Enlil’s faction will come to the same conclusion, she said. Once they discover Jason’s potential, they will move to control or eliminate him. Probably both, with factions pursuing different strategies.

  Precisely. Gentius set down the teacup. Which is why we move first. Uziel needs Jason protected and developed. We need him secured and directed. For now, those objectives align.

  And when they diverge?

  He turned toward her, and she saw in his expression the same cold patience that had preserved their house across millennia while other noble families crumbled. It was not the face of a man troubled by the question. It was the face of a man who had already answered it.

  Then we prove once again why the el Sibars endure. His eyes held hers without apology. We adapt. We calculate. We secure advantages. We survive.

  Aferdita held his look. She wasn’t a stranger to this logic, yet she felt it differently now. Perhaps because she had spent the last hour listening to Enlil articulate the same reasoning toward a different end: hierarchy justified by utility, control dressed as necessity.

  She pushed the thought aside. The Draconian fleet would arrive in months, no matter how uncomfortable she felt.

  Begin coordinating with Mirela and Hyseni, Gentius instructed. Find Anne through the psychic connection she maintains with the Shamhdi collective. She can lead us to Jason. He paused, his eyes sharpening. And once we have him, we will direct his development under our supervision. We do not permit Draconian control. We do not allow him to become an independent force answering to no empire.

  I will contact Mirela tonight, she said. Hyseni’s quantum sensor network can be realigned to Anne’s dimensional frequency once Mirela refines the resonance signature. Given Anu’s timeline, we can’t afford to build the capability gradually.

  No. Gentius’s eyes returned to the viewport, to the dark, vast, and indifferent expanse beyond the glass. We can’t afford anything gradual anymore.

  * * *

  As Aferdita left her father’s stateroom, fiber-optic strands woven through her translucent robe traced shifting patterns of light with each step, azure bleeding into violet, then back again, as if her thoughts had taken external form.

  The irony arrived without ceremony.

  Centuries of careful cultivation. Human proxy governments built from scratch, progressive Mestari families cultivated across generations, infrastructure designed to demonstrate that Imperial subjects yielded more when given limited freedoms. The entire Shamhdi project rested on a single, elegant premise: coercion was simply an inferior way to extract value.

  Enlil had called it idiotic. The reactionary faction labeled it dangerous. And now, reduced to three months, Aferdita found herself enacting that same philosophy in a fraction of the required time, under conditions that made the original plan seem almost effortless by comparison.

  She paused at a viewport. Sheramda filled the lower quadrant of the star field, its storm systems rotating in slow, indifferent spirals.

  Somewhere beyond the dimensional barriers Mirela had not yet penetrated, Jason Reynolds wrote software for financial institutions. He worried about his sister’s psychiatric diagnosis. He attended church services and consulted psychic mediums and moved through his ordinary existence with no awareness that ancient empires had begun calculating his value the way her father calculated cerauniam yields.

  The strategy Enlil had mocked for decades—that subject populations outperformed under bounded freedom—had produced the most strategically significant being in the known Cosmos.

  She activated her frequency belt’s communication array, preparing to contact Mirela on Genuvia.

  The irony would be richer, Aferdita thought, if we had more time to savor it.

  The communication array hummed with readiness.

  Whether Jason Reynolds deserved protection for his own sake was irrelevant. The real question was whether the el Sibars would reach him before the Draconians did.

  She opened the channel to Genuvia.

  * * *