Cristo had Claudia in stitches, even with Portia there. "Magic prevents crime, even deters it — everyone is so convinced law enforcement will capture and execute them if they so much as think the word 'premeditate.' No one bothers committing crimes any more, ask Portia for the numbers. She knows the facts.

"She can tell you all about an incident where a link took someone's arm off, and certainly the details are gruesome, but look at the numbers. We open thousands of links every day and there have been fewer than twelve link-related accidents this week. People hardly ever get killed by them either, we're talking less than two deaths by link per month. Twenty-nine people this year have been crushed to death by their furniture, you're more likely to be killed by your mattress. But with greater access to magic comes greater ability to protect oneself from being crushed by one's mattress."

Claudia couldn't breathe for laughing, she was hanging on his every word.

She sobered up and a minute later, however, she was back in the argument to win it. As if she were pulling out her trump card, she said, "So we can protect ourselves from being crushed by our furniture. What's to protect us from each other, when the law is on the side of the company exequis?"

The conversation spiraled out of control and downward from there. Claudia accused the boss of abusing Constellation's power. Like executing the three who tried to assassinate him last night. 

"He's locked three alleged assassins away for attempted murder, and he gets to be judge, jury and executioner. What exactly is the boss doing with the prisoners, isn't that just further proof of Constellation's complete overreach? The boss of a Constellation branch has authorization to incarcerate, interrogate and, in the end, execute law breakers? What's the procedure for that anyway, do the guardia form a firing squad or does the boss just pop Sera Cassus one in the head?"

"I really don't know," Cristo said, feeling for once that his soon-to-be-late not yet mother was saying something sort of reasonable.

Then he took a second and thought about what he had just said. "I really don't know." His own innocuous words banged around in his head until they reminded him of Sera Cassus saying them earlier. "I really don't know." They bounced around in his head, triggered other thoughts, set off like dominoes falling over in order.

Until he knew where he might find Milana Nox.

He was so close to taking back Claudia Solace with his voice alone, the smack in the face realization that he needed to leave now if he was going to save Milana's life hurt like, well, a slap in the face.

"Or does the boss just pop Sera Cassus one in the head?" Claudia had said, and Sera Cassus said, "I really don't know" — in response to the question Cristo asked her, "Why would Justin Marius need to both blackmail and bribe Antonio Solari?"

His own words echoed in the empty cave of his head ("I really don't know") and Sera Cassus had said them too — and maybe she didn't, but Cristo did. The answer to why Justin Marius would need to both blackmail and bribe Tony Solari had been given to Cristo less than half an hour ago.

Aelana had told him.

Exequi Alma Valerian was blackmailing Tony Solari too. Justin Marius needed to do one better. 

Which meant Cristo needed to leave, right now. He knew where he might find Milana Nox.

"Stop," said Diana, and she tried to grab on to Candra to stay upright.

Floor, ceiling, fountain, and front desk spun in her vision, somersaulting twice while she put out her hands to grab on to something to keep from stumbling, but Candra stepped out of her way and watched.

Anger cut through the vertigo for just a second and she almost tackled the smug witch until the surge of everything else brought her face to her hands and her knees to the floor.

Her shoulders heaved and Candra piled on, "Cristo doesn't want to see you." Confusion dissolved into belief. Of course not, Cristo was too busy for Milana, and Diana had no idea how to save her. Clarity.

Diana brought Milana to the first elite gala they invited her to. Why shouldn't she invite her best friend and business partner? It was a hot evening in the capital but the air outside was magical, in that it was freezing cold for a twenty foot radius from the Accius estate, an ancient two story manor in aging sandstone and Madera granite with a dome and pillars and everything, the only modern touch that the four-hundred-year-old towers floated over the stout but gigantic monstrosity; short but capacious within and colossal without.

The girls shopped all week for the perfect sleeveless gowns to avoid heatstroke and left the shawls at home to stay cool, but now they were being refrigerated even outside the manor.

Dedicated to enjoying her first big party as a certified wealthy person, Diana demanded that they stay out there under the stars even as the cold descended on them and she refused to leave early; instead they surrendered to holding each other and rubbing warmth back into bare arms and strolling the outdoor balcony back and forth to keep the blood flowing in what over time started to look like some kind of jig or party game.

Just when they started to descend into giggles of horrification at what the old school wealthy people were going to think of them, hugging each other and pacing back and forth as they held each other in a kind of marching dance, other couples started to join them, and their laughter morphed from terrified to authentic in just minutes.

Then Accius himself found dozens of his guests out on the patio dancing a jig to keep warm and offered to turn the cold down, to which Diana and Milana were the first to reply, "No! Thank you!" and finally succumbed to uproarious laughter that brought them sprawling to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

And apparently they were such trendsetters that half the other waltzing guests thought that would be fun too, and six more couples wound up lying on the ground with their brogues and heels in the air.

It was a night so not unlike this one except that it was actually night and except a million other reasons that made it totally unlike this one.

"He sent you to keep me busy," Diana said. "Cristo sent you."

Her lungs heaved. Blood vessels burst she worried under her eyes and pain in her head exploded, then merely pulsed, then exploded again, and she worried what she must look like and how would she recover from her head exploding and her mascara running down her face it just wasn't possible she had to go was Milana dead? Already? Cristo never found her, he never even looked, still missing, still missing. Cristo never meant to find her, only to waste time away until Milana was dead when she was supposed to live forever with Diana, all while he enjoyed himself at the party of the year — or the week, if that.

Candra started to laugh at her, just laugh, out loud, and there was no one else around but she felt as if everyone was watching her anyway, an audience of a hundred pairs of eyes and they belonged to people who knew how stupid she was, people who knew better than she did with her stupid ideas. Naive. Dreams. They all knew how stupid she was and they started to laugh too in the seventh floor lobby of the Invernali Constellation building.

Her knees bruised when she crashed onto hard marble floor and black flooded down her cheeks, she'd never get the streaks off, they'd all see, she couldn't go back to the party like this and the board meeting at crepesculum Daddy said and the lobby spun again the world was spinning too fast and unless Cristo was lying about that too, the empire collapsed. Like her, collapsed on marble floor. When it collapsed it was going to be her fault because she wasn't giving Milana up even if the world shattered or burned or exploded or collapsed or burned or whatever you wanted to metaphorize it as and it would burn.

A picture of broken Soliara and broke down Potestas Tower crumbled against the sidewalk and broken Milana's body with a crack down her doll face the picture patched over Diana's eyes and blocked out the cartwheeling lobby, her whole vision, everything in her crushed, crunched at her center and broken was all she could see in her field of vision.

And was elevated, like a floating office tower, in a wake of calm, rising up through water, rising up to float on the surface of a calm wake as if she could wake, sudden calm or at least the absence of anything else. The picture over her eyes was replaced by the lobby of the seventh floor of Potestas Tower right side up and she stood up, all of it gone from her mind, and noticed without caring Candra putting a sharp shiny something like a wand back into her coat.

Candra asked, "What did you want Cristo for?"

Diana answered, "To find Milana and bring her back to me."

It occurred to Candra to ask who Milana was, but then, she didn't care.

"Who is Cristo?" she asked instead, and like a good little puppet, Diana, mind under Candra's control, told her what she knew. Candra smiled while she listened, taking just a minute to enjoy her new pretty doll toy.

She had wanted one of these of her own for a little while now.

Cristo had an idea where to look for Milana Nox. He needed to leave, right now, right this second. He needed to find Exequi Valerian.

"Excuse me, Exequi Claudia. I'm sorry, I just remembered something urgent that I forgot to do. Pardon my rude and sudden departure."

He started stepping back from her and forced out more consolations to console her even though his mind was racing a mile a minute in the other direction.

"It was really nice talking to you, I want to continue our conversation another time. I'll come find you again ... in just a moment," he insisted, "just as soon as I can," and he meant it. Stepping backwards away from her, he had the strange feeling that she and Portia Nero and the pool tables were shrinking and getting smaller the further he got, like tiny people on a screen where the camera was zooming back out.

It was possible Valerian, and not exequi Justin Marius, had abducted Milana Nox.

Where was Alma Valerian? Cristo hadn't seen she yet at the party, but she had to be here somewhere. Campaigning. The boss invited her, and no politician worth her salt would miss this campaign opportunity, with every voter no doubt under the same levitating roof.

Cristo ran through the logic again. Alma Valerian was blackmailing Tony Solari to vote for her. Which meant it was possible she was every bit as devious as Justin Marius in that she had her hand pulling as many puppet strings.

There was a possibility, then, that Milana Nox was not abducted by Exequi Marius at all, but by Valerian, the candidate who while as corrupt and manipulative at the very least wouldn't, so far as Cristo knew, kill half the population by ending the immortality of the bottom stratum of Soliara society.

Links lined the perimeter of the bar lounge. Cristo didn't know whose genius idea it was to give the guests access to every empty office and conference room on every floor of Potestas Tower, but whoever it was had let Alma Valerian get away to Cristo had no idea where. His idolis watch read almost hora nona. There wasn't time to waste running around looking for the exequi, so he took the link that happened to be closest to him — as if that made sense as a time saving measure.

Bookshelves lined either side of his march toward the sound of voices. He almost ran, as if he were going to find Milana here, as if he were going to find Valerian here.

He ran to the end of the shelves and stopped. Took in chilling partygoers enjoying live jazz, no sign of Milana Nox there, no Alma Valerian.

Took in Nova in the corner talking to Calcus Donato like Cristo had asked. Good girl. But no Valerian.

Maybe Cristo could call her, create a commlink; maybe Valerian had a secret router connection in Potestas Tower like Lien Cassus and maybe she could accept a call. But maybe not. And why would she answer?

Frustrated, frozen in inaction, Cristo stared blankly. At Nova Dasilva. Who had connected Lien Cassus to the Potestas Tower router — for reasons Cristo had chosen not to interrogate her for yet as long as she helped him.

Maybe she was blackmailed; with what, he couldn't guess, and why she could care about being blackmailed was beyond him since her entire family was already dead. Maybe they just threatened to kill her.

Or maybe she was evil.

But then why had someone, in the first iteration of the timeline, gone and murdered her the night of Ilan Potestas's assassination?

That was a mystery for an hour from now, when it became Cristo's job to make sure history repeated itself.

Right now she was working. Campaigning. Over in the corner, she talked, as ordered, to Calcus Donato, uncovering what bribe he had accepted to vote for Justin Marius. She only had to scare him a little, and she had over an hour to talk him out of his shameful decision.

Except as Cristo watched, she wasn't talking to Calcus Donato at all. Listening would have been acceptable too; she could collect information to control the man by listening.

Only she wasn't listening to Calcus Donato, because he wasn't the one talking. He had hardly said a word the whole time Cristo had been standing there paralyzed by his own thoughts.

Like the thought that she was a traitor.

The entire time Cristo had been staring in that general direction, Nova had been staring at Great Uncle Calo. Starry eyed. Laughing at every joke he made, touching his arm. Completely ignoring the target next to her. As Cristo's eyes began to narrow, Calcus Donato said he enjoyed talking with them but he must excuse himself. He turned and left. Nova stayed.

Calcus Donato almost rubbed arms with Cristo as he walked by. The paralysis grew worse — to go after Calcus, he shouldn't let Calcus get away — or stay here staring at Nova as she flirted with his great uncle? He couldn't lose Donato, but a part of him wanted to stay here and strangle the last Dasilva to death.

I said, out loud but quietly, to myself, "All right, back into the game again."

Novus Fortunato ditched me to talk to some ladies around one of the fire pits. I could see Cytheria Demarco alone by the window drinking the same wine as everybody else, and I knew where to find a much better vintage to get into her glass.

I made it three steps toward Cytheria before being accosted by possibly the last person I ever expected to stop me, because what could Leander the bodyguard possibly want me for?

"I wanna talk to you, Boss Junior," he said, striding up to me at full speed. Instead of stopping when he got to me, he spun me by the arm and pulled me with him. "Link to your rooms." It was an order.

Six paces ahead of us there was a gap in the crowd, so I silently asked the stars to put a link there. By the time our shoes left the floor to take the sixth step, the carpet of my apartment was underfoot.

All business, I spun on him, putting the window and my desk at my back, and I didn't offer him a seat on my trendy sitting room furniture set of leather sofa and high backed armchairs. "Make this quick, I need to get back," I said.

I didn't offer my father's bodyguard a drink from the fake oak liquor cabinet in the corner, either.

Leander extended his arm and put a firm hand on my shoulder. I looked down at it and then back up at him.

"Listen, son," he said. He looked older than me, but really? "You're in the wrong place, and you've got your priorities all wrong."

I tried to wriggle out of his grasp but he wasn't letting go. I'm not exactly strong.

"Just hear me out. It's not that I doubt your contribution to the boss's efforts to have Sunyin Aura elected president of the Constellation Company. I'm sure you're very persuasive. And subtle. Cunning, whatever. It's just that you personally don't have all night to waste chasing down electors to make sure they vote on your side. You, Boss Stephen, can't spend the hours tonight struggling over who controls the company—" I tried to interrupted him, still wriggling and I said, "What are you talking about?" but he talked right over me, saying, "tomorrow because if you don't get to the lab in downtown Soliara right now there won't be a company tomorrow. Something is happening, kid—" and I tried to speak over him, I said, "All right, all right, stop—" and Leander kept going, "Something's wrong and out of control, magic's screwed up physics and you have no idea what's going to happen next. If Constellation doesn't identify the cause . . . come on, you don't need to be told this, snap out of it."

He grabbed my other shoulder with his other hand and started to shake me as if he was trying to wake me up. "Wake up," he said. "The fabric of reality is coming undone. What have you been doing all day?"

"That's enough," I said, and he stopped shaking me and let go of my shoulders. I was grateful because I don't know how I was planning to make him stop if he chose not to. "I was meeting with Sunyin Aura, and then the boss sent me to watch the prisoners, then Cristo broke the prisoners out and the sun set so I was watching that . . ."

"And you had no interest in identifying the cause yourself, examining what had changed in the past twenty-four hours to make the sun rise and set faster and faster. The boss said you spend day and night theoreticizing about the magic and the stars, but today you're just an unskilled prison guard who failed to guard the prisoners. What have you been doing?"

I don't know. I drop my mouth open to say I don't know, but there's no point. That's Leander's point, he doesn't need to be told.

Leander points at the desk, not knowing what he's talking about. "Sit down and scribble equations until you figure it out. Solve the problem. Why did the sun rise early? Why did it set early? When's it going to come up? What's going to make it stop?"

Grinning like a jackass, I say, "Isn't it obvious?" I go to the desk anyway and sit down. Take out a notebook, flip to a blank page, take out a pen. It just came to me this moment but I feel like being cavalier. I scribble words on it. Then I look up into Leander's eyes and realize he doesn't know. I second guess myself. "Maybe I shouldn't tell you."

"What, tell me what? Do you know how to make it stop?" He comes closer to look at what I wrote. He frowns. "What, no Roman alphabet?" he says.

I take from the furrow of his brows that he can't read, so I don't bother to cover the writing up. 

"Tell me, or I won't leave you alone all night. I'll follow you around the party every time you try to talk to an elector and I'll just talk over you and tell you to go to Constellation downtown." 

There's a gun in my desk drawer and I can't help but thinking about it.

"Okay, okay," I say instead. Longest interrogation holdout ever. "If you insist ... and the company election depends on it ... It was the middle of the night when Cristo turned up at Potestas Tower to stop the boss's assassination, so the signs weren't visible right away, but within six hours the sun was rising early. It's obvious." I stop and I enjoy the moment of holding out.

"What's obvious? I arrived at the same time."

"Well, maybe it's you, then, making the planet turn faster relative to the sun." I don't really know what he means by arrived but it can't be like Cristo means it. "I think it's more likely, however, that the schism between our perception of time and the passing of time everywhere else in the universe took place the moment Cristo came back in time. Cristo's from the future. To determine if I'm right I'd have to run the numbers, scribble the equations." I look down at the paper in front of me and read what I wrote for Leander's benefit: "It's Cristo's fault."

Leander nods ten times imperceptibly, breathing in. Then without missing more of a beat than that he says, "So how do we make it stop?"