While Cytheria was watching a beautiful, wild snowfall, listening to live music and sipping a glass of wine, if a plebeian bottle, Terra Demarco was chained up in a dark room somewhere only Justin Marius knew.

Her hands and feet chained to each other, she was waiting, uncomfortable but not scared, for her mother, because nothing would keep Cytheria from freeing her, even if the world had to burn in exchange.

Se mourned her brother, and the only fire smoldering hotter than the burn of words left unsaid was the vengeance kindling for the people responsible. Terra was cold, and hungry, and dehydrated, tired and bored and mutinously, explosively angry, and the longer she sat cramped up like that, the less she would forgive her mother for leaving her there.

It was time for Cytheria to put down the wine glass and get her out.

In the dusty living room of the Demarco manor, young Cytheria sits with Cristo having a smoke. Sunlight filters through stained glass windows in red and green and royal blue. Cytheria revels in her youth. She's pristine, smooth and glossy like she was in her first adolescence, the skin around her sharp eyes under black lashes as smooth as it was when she was a child, her hair soft as honey and full black and glossy. Her lips and cheeks are bee-stung, her face and body are round.

Only her frown is old, and the way she steeples plump fingers and crosses tanned legs while she sits with sophisticated posture. If it weren't for that you would think she was seventeen.

Cristo says, "Your plan is taking a toll on you." He calls it her plan.

Cytheria frowns deeper than before and creases line her forehead — not wrinkles, only creases. She thinks about that for a moment. Silence falls over them.

In the Potestas Tower bar, old Cytheria dropped the wine glass down on a bar top by the window where the snow fell past. The bar was black and hot from the fires. Lights flashed the same tempo as the band. The crowd parted by magic between her and Justin Marius across the party at the other bar. Cytheria stopped in her footsteps, frozen cold, and didn't cross to him. The crowd gave up on her and moved back into the way. Marius disappeared again behind the crush of dinner jackets, long sleeves and fur coats.

The Demarco manor is quiet in the morning. Sitting on a sofa half her age, young Cytheria eyes the annoying youth across her coffee table who will never have a wrinkle for a minute of his life.

She takes a puff of her cigarette. She says, "I got used to the guilt a long time ago," in a strong silky voice. She loves to sing. "It was my fault the first time. It's hardly any different this time. It was my fault both of my children died then, I can take the blame now too."

In the Potestas Tower bar, the old woman took a step. The bodies didn't part to give her a second chance, and her second step forward brought her between suit jacketed backs, someone in a long sleeved short skirted silhouette dress pushed her back, and Cytheria rocked backwards on her low heels, then took the third step. Wading toward Marius, her conscience slowed her momentum like knee-deep water, hesitation weighed her feet down, and dozens of dancing party guests pushed like a tide against her.

She struggled to walk. She fought to stop herself with every step. She fought to step forward, one foot in front of the other.

Cristo leans in toward the pristine young doll on the sofa with her legs crossed and says, "You need to be sure. There can't be a doubt in your mind. It won't be worth the risks we're facing. This is your last chance to tell me if you would have been able to withstand the death of one of your children to protect the future." He doesn't say the name. Just one child. Only one, he says. She shouldn't hold out for that hope, they never should have even discussed it. What if neither could survive? Cytheria had already lost them both, she could do it again. For the good of many.

She meets his eyes with her dark ones and, face shaking like an old lady, she nods. She can't speak right now, but she nods her head. There's a mirror across the living room and over Cristo's shoulder she can see herself in it, the picture of beauty, big and young and vibrant, about to give all that up.

In the dark and flashing strobe lights of the dance floor, against the swell restraining her ankles, Cytheria pushed forward with her eyes on the man at the end of the bar who had killed her Tian, who meant to play with her strings like she was a puppet doll, who she would give whatever the hell he wanted and send society straight to hell. She stopped.

Young Cytheria looks away from Cristo, down at her rug. There's a wine stain in three drops in the white. Cristo gets up from his arm chair and walks around the coffee table to crouch down in front of Cytheria where she sits and asks the question that could send the whole empire right to hell. "How well do you know yourself?"

But Terra was chained up and helpless with a man with a gun ready to murder her, and only her mother could save her. When Justin Marius left his bar stool and started toward Cytheria to meet her halfway, she could have turned and run, but she stood against the stream that was her strong character, moral fibre, conscience, and almost half of her heart.

Young Cytheria looks down at the young man crouching in front of her. He has put so much of his hope into the certainty that she'll be strong enough. She tries to put as much confidence in her eyes as she can and continues to meet his. Another puff on her cigarette and she taps an ash into the tray on the end table beside her chair and answers, "About as well as anybody does, I guess."

Cristo decided if Nova was going to spend all night dangling on Calo Gloriam's arm, she wasn't helping him, but as long as she stayed where she was she wasn't hurting either.

He even had a plan to find out if she left. A waiter had taken it upon himself to bring trays of drinks and food into the reference library, probably not out of the goodness of his heart but because the guests had tipped him heavily to do so. Cristo pulled aside the man in the tuxedo with the platter of empties on his way back. "See the woman in the corner talking to that guy?" he whispered. "Call me if she leaves this library. Or talks to anyone other than that white guy." He had no modern day cash on hand so he added, "The boss will compensate you with a generous gratuity."

It sunk in as Cristo walked away that when the waiter in the tuxedo made the call, Cristo would have to make the history of Nova Dasilva's murder repeat itself early — a euphemism that was starting to lose its meaning because if Nova was a traitor to the boss and President Solin, Cristo couldn't wait around for her murderer to strike.

On the bright side, he had invented a way to find Alma Valerian for their chat. He didn't need to call the Exequi, he only needed the boss to create a comlink to every security guard asking for eyes on her. The second time a portal no bigger than an earhole opened up in front of Cristo's face, the boss's voice said, "The elevator operator just let her off on the forty-seventh floor. She's reentered the bar lounge." What a waste of time. The second Cristo darted back into the bar lounge through the link, he made out Alma in the crowd striding toward the bar. Where she had been didn't matter. Blundering around feeling his way in the dark, Cristo had found her exactly where he himself had been fifteen minutes ago, and the only way to get that time back would be to act quickly now.

He beat the Exequi in a race to the bar.

"Vadio bairrada tinto," the exequi ordered. Cristo sidled up and told the bartender, "I'll have the same," as if he and Alma were best friends.

The exequi turned to his apparent drinking partner expecting a familiar face, but to her credit she still held her hand out to shake when she determined Cristo was a stranger — not an elector or anyone important.

"Julian Somnare," Cristo said. "Do you know where Milana Nox is, exequi?"

"Sorry?" said the young woman, who looked all of seventeen and didn't have so many years on that.

The bartender came back and dropped off two glasses of the red wine, and when he left Alma had thought of more to say, but Cristo talked over the part where she tried to say she didn't understand or she didn't know who that was. "It occurs to me you've been coercing votes exactly as unethically as your opponent, which is fine, since you're going to oppose him — you're going to stand against everything he tries to accomplish and everything he's going to stand for — but I do need to know whether you took Milana Nox to coerce elector Diana Aemilia to vote for you.

"Please tell me it was you. Then tell me where Milana Nox is right now."

Alma responded predictably, leaning back in her seat with contempt crumpling her eyebrows over incredulous squinty eyes, her mouth open and speechlessly offended until she said, "No, those are baseless accusations. No, no, I didn't coerce anyone to vote for me. Has a woman been abducted?" Exactly what she could be expected to say if she were guilty and just as likely if she were innocent. "Did this elector Aemilia accuse me of coercion?"

She had a good point, but Cristo diverted the question for now like a good politician's son. "Exequi Tony Solari said you blackmailed him."

With the slimy confidence and spine of a proficient liar, Alma said, "That's not true. I don't know anything about that accusation." As if she were reassuring Cristo, as if it were a fact, as if it were nothing to worry himself about.

The difference now when Cristo suspected she was lying suggested that before she had been telling the truth.

The Exequi didn't let Cristo out of answering her previous question. "Did Diana Aemilia say that I coerced her or not?" She didn't seem to mind that this sounded like a confession that she blackmailed Tony Solari, she was much more outraged by Aemilia's accusation, she was readying to defend herself from the accusation that she had coerced Aemilia but not Solari. She didn't and she wasn't going to go down for the crime she wasn't behind. The accusation really bothered her.

Because she was innocent.

"I was really hoping that you had," Cristo said into his full glass.

"If she didn't make the accusation, where did you get the idea that my campaign was responsible? Did Aemilia say she had to vote for me?"

"No," said Cristo. "She told me it was Exequi Marius. But the thing is, I realized that she's lying."

He huffed and put down the glass, with every intention of leaving the silky vintage undrunk despite the interesting mineral wash that followed the ash and black fruit taste.

He didn't need to say this to Alma, he should maybe talk to Diana about it. It just would have been much easier if Alma had been behind it. "She lied about something. But I don't know what. I thought maybe this was it."

Dazed and with conscious thoughts no longer forming, disjointed words and images not forming sentences, paragraphs, arguments, ideas, he turned from the bar, and Alma said, "Are you saying Marius abducted a woman to coerce the vote of an elector?" As Cristo unceremoniously tripped walking away in a fugue, Alma called, "Wait, answer me." And started to get off her barstool, but Cristo walked away, then reached for his gnomon and made himself disappear in the middle of the dance floor.