Chatting her head off at a despondent Tony Solari seated next to her at the corner bar, Nova's thoughts careened off in a different direction from whatever the hell was spewing out of her mouth.

She glanced over her shoulder and couldn't stop herself from sending a glare at one tasteless partygoer and then another. The Soliari had no hearts, which wasn't surprising, but they also had way less class than they thought they did. The party was a hit, a whole floor of the building packed like a night club, and only a quarter of the attendees had anything like a formal invitation to the party but had nevertheless shown up a mere hour after the assassination of the President of Constellation.

Everywhere she looked, glasses clinked together to toast the end of the world and the death of Gaia Solin; she saw laughter, sometimes right in the face of someone who might actually mourn the woman's passing.

Few of the board executives had anything to laugh about. Either their candidate of choice had been murdered, or they were being bribed or extorted to vote for Justin Marius. Come to think of it, Justin Marius's supporters had plenty to celebrate.

Tony Solari was another matter. A gloomy mess, which in Nova's mind kept his class firmly intact. His severe depression was the only appropriate mood to express after the events of today.

Unfortunately, that made him difficult to talk to. Few things were more humiliating than speaking to someone who only responded in monosyllabic grunts.

"Two parties in two nights," Nova's mouth was saying. "Has the boss gone insane? I'd call it a mid-life crisis, if something without an end can be said to have a middle. I guess if anything else important happens, at least everyone will all be in one place. We wouldn't want to be too far from each other when the next piece of gossip breaks out, don't you think?" she asked.

Tony grumbled something in reply that sounded like more than one syllable. At least two. Progress. Her job right now was to tell him that his wife knew about the affair. That way he couldn't be blackmailed. She didn't quite know how to start, however.

"I know I wouldn't want to be alone if the moons disappeared from the sky or the whole capital floated out of the ground or something." All efforts to gain rapport with him before she dropped the bomb out of nowhere. Which couldn't be helped; there was really no possible preamble.

"Mmmm," said Tony, back to the ultimate in brevity.

"It's an exciting time to be alive," said Nova. "Terrifying, but exciting."

Cristo turned around to face young me and asked, "How are you doing?"

"Good, good," I said. Cristo was distracted by his own train of thought and replied, "Good. Keep it up." He clapped me on the back like a friend and disappeared in the crowd in three steps.

I went in the opposite direction as if I had big plans. I saw the boss by the big windows; he was standing next to Claudia Solace, who looked longingly at the occupied lounge seats and shifted as if she had been on her feet for too long. The boss talked animatedly while Claudia didn't pay attention, and I gnashed my teeth together and murdered my enamel, or tried not to and tried not to glare at them. Claudia Solace was the only person I knew what to say to — I could persuade her. But she was already engaged by the boss, who could have persuaded anyone in the room to vote for whoever the hell he said to vote for.

I sighed and placed my empty champagne flute on another passing tray, and made it to the nearest fireplace to stare uselessly into the smoke and flames.

In thirty seconds the man standing next to me spoke up. "Good evening, Aurelian," said a new elector to the executive board of the Constellation company: Exequi Novus Fortunato. "If you can call it evening."

Nova couldn't bring herself to say any more in monologue. Damnit, Tony Solari was supposed to be the easiest target. All she needed to do was tell him his wife knew about the affair, and then it couldn't be used to blackmail him.

But he had to believe her. And if she made him angry, he wouldn't.

So Nova shut her mouth and took a peek at his face, memorized it, turned away and studied its copy in her mind's eye while she pretended to look at the partygoers looking out the window. In her head she saw Tony's wrinkled eyes were lifeless, his brow and jaw relaxed like a quitter, like he was meditating, not the tense crinkle of a man clenching his jaw to death, as if that would do anything to help.

What if he asked how she knew? She took a big gulp from her glass.

Only when she looked back, the face she memorized had transformed. Agony spread over it and then his shoulders were shaking and he dropped his head. Either he was passed out drunk in his seat, or he was having a good cry.

Nova gasped, sincerely, and then hid her elation at the opportunity this presented.

"Oh, Exequi Solari," she said. "Tell me what's wrong," begging for the preamble to come to her. She dared herself to lean over, put both arms around him and pull him into a hug.

For a heart stopping moment she thought he wasn't going to let her hug him, but a second later he was sobbing into her shoulder and speaking the first audible words she had caught from him all night, heaving it all out while she patted him on the back, pouring his whole soul into her ear while she whispered, "It's okay. It's all okay. Tell me everything."

Cristo scanned the dance floor, lounge sofas, barstools and the buffet line for Calcus Donato, and for someone else who could talk to Calcus Donato, since Cristo wasn't the best choice, and once he took a stab at it, he wouldn't get a second chance.

The boss was missing, presumably talking to someone important. Nova was at the bar with Tony Solari. Cristo had lost Stephen Potestas, but who cared — he wouldn't exactly be right for the job.

A few hundred voices rumbled into a consistent low drone, but he could hear individual strains of conversation perfectly. One hand on the gnomon in his jacket, the wand allowed his ears to  pick up whichever voice he wanted to hear loudest, just a little magic trick he had learned out of a book at school, but the most genius engineers today would still be debating whether it was even possible.

The more innocent guests discussed the party.

"It's too crowded, did everyone who was invited bring five of their friends? I got an actual invitation, I think I should get to sit down."

"What if Exequi Potestas is the one making the days shorter, just so he can throw an end of the world party? Who else would throw a party tonight?"

"At this rate they're going to run out of food to serve. No shortage of liquor at the bar, though. Great combination."

"I'm sure there's a gathering at the Marius mansion. What you have to do to get on that guest list I can't guess, or wouldn't guess out loud in public."

"There isn't. No one's at the Marius estate. Everyone's here."

Some guests whispered and some eyes flicked side to side looking for eavesdroppers while they talked, but they would think Cristo was too far away to hear, and he didn't stare.

"I don't trust anyone on the board to replace President Solin. How do we get them to hire outside the company?"

"That's a good one."

"I don't think Gaia Solin's death had anything to do with the sun going down. I think someone got tired of waiting for the climate to change. Tomorrow the electors will probably choose her murderer in her office."

Cristo moved on, all innocence.

Many of the electors and other guests were confident everything was going to work out.

"It's all being taken care of by Solin's security department. Can I call it an all-nighter if Atticus Cecina is still at the office? This counts as night, right?"

"Thank the stars Gaia Solin is dead, I'm done living in fear of what she might do next. In a few hours Justin Marius will make sure nothing like this ever happens again. No one person will sentence the planet to dangerous experiments, over and over again. Nobody will be able to play with our humanity, or toy with the rules of reality."

"Or destroy the planet."

Cristo moved on, all innocence. Hopefully.

Cristo passed through a crowd that should have been whispering about the end of the world and assassins and conspiracy theories, but instead was shouting about them, until he came to the bar where Nova and Tony Solari were talking.

For a second he eavesdropped. And wished he had time to not trust her. Not to trust her to handle Tony. Not to trust her not to betray everyone alive.

Instead he grabbed Ignatius Varian and drew him into conversation. "The end of the world, is it?" Cristo said to Ignatius. "What do you think, Exequi Varian?"

Ignatius Varian blinked and squinted at him and said, "Have we met?"

"Not exactly," said Cristo, and he held out his hand to be shaken. "Julian Somnare, Exequi."

"The rescuer in the fox mask, aren't you? Nice to meet you. Now, as to whether the world is ending, certainly it's been an eventful day, and it may take some time before we understand what any of these events mean, but no, I don't think the world is ending.

"It seems to me that the speed of the passing of time in the Solari Empire has changed relative to the speed of the passage of time in the rest of the universe. That's all. It might be the whole planet, or only our little corner of the world. The sun and the other planets carry on as they always have. Only Soliara is experiencing a discrepancy between our experience of time passing here on the ground and the speed at which the sun rises and sets. That is, the speed at which the planet rotates so that our hemisphere faces toward the sun and continues past it into shadow.

"Perfectly harmless." He smiled a knowing smile and enjoyed having it all figured out. "It's not that the planet is spinning any faster, think how destructive any significant amount of acceleration would be. Wouldn't trees and buildings topple? The change in velocity would have an effect on gravity and the planet's atmosphere—"

"It wouldn't," said Candra Satiri. Cristo had just noticed the head of red curls over Varian's shoulder a second before it turned around and with a delighted smile on her mouth and in her eyes, she joined them.

Cristo's heart sank at the foreseeable derailing of his train of conversation.

"None of that makes any sense. Nothing would fling over if the planet spun faster; that's what would happen if it were to stop spinning. If the planet stopped spinning, everything fixed to it would stop and everything not fixed to it would continue at the same speed.

"But an increase in velocity wouldn't have that effect; however, gravity's pull would be weakened, so you're right that the planet isn't spinning faster because we would probably be floating off the ground by now. So there goes the theory that President Solin was experimenting with learning to fly."

Cristo took the chance to change the subject. Sort of. "Do you think it was President Solin's fault?"

"Yes," said Varian. "She must have done something. Her experiments precipitated the change in our perspective of time, and she died for it, or someone kill her for it, hoping to return to the natural order of things. We all knew the company's next inventions: explosive devices, gun reflecting shields, flying transportation. Fixing immortality, or reversing immortality." Candra's eyes widened at the mention of the taboo, since no one talked about eternal life these days, but the word elicited no more reaction than that. "Then there are the rumors: time travel links, mind control, clones. Bringing back the dead. Any one of those things could have caused a break from reality, if done incorrectly.

"The universe doesn't care what rules of reality we change, it doesn't make sentient judgments of right and wrong, but how we change the rules might be the key to breaking all of creation into tiny pieces. President Solin never understood that.

"That's why Exequi Marius is the only acceptable replacement," he finished. Cristo noticed how his voice rose louder when he said it.

"Have you always supported Justin Marius?" Cristo asked.

"Yes, I've always supported Justin Marius. Always. Ever since he joined the board, I've agreed with every proposal and every stance."

"I wasn't aware he was so popular at Constellation." That was the most argument Cristo dared put up with Candra standing right there.

"Everyone is rallying beyond Exequi Marius, and I always said he was the man for the job. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the people want caution from their next leader after everything, and now that the president has gotten herself killed more than ever." Varian continued to ramble as Cristo half pretended to listen.

Between Varian's and Candra's shoulder, Cristo saw Nova put her hand on Tony Solari's shoulder, lean in to say something comforting in his ear, then get off her bar stool and dance off into the party crowd.

Thank you for reading Stars Rise. Please leave a star to fuel this magic world, and let me know if you're enjoying the gathering (we won't call it a party so soon after Gaia's passing; that wouldn't be classy).