Franco approached Stephen with two rocks glasses clawed from the top and passed one over. "Thanks," said Stephen, but he seemed distracted and was about to take the glass and run off somewhere. Franco's plan had been to hesitate. Deliberate, procrastinate saying what he wanted to say, but Stephen was starting to excuse himself and leave so Franco was forced to urgency. "Where are you off to in such a hurry? Since when is there anyone you want to talk to at these things? Do you suddenly enjoy parties now?"

Stephen gave him a very cold shoulder when he didn't reply and turned away; Franco was forced to grab him roughly by the shoulder and turn him back around. Then he remembered Stephen's irate voice over the comlink when he called Candra to invite her to the party; he heard the "Thanks" again in his head and again registered a certain ire in it. "Hey," he pushed. "I wanted to talk to you for a second."

Stephen didn't say anything. There was a flicker in his eyes and a miniscule arch of his eyebrow. Like he wouldn't even give Franco the courtesy of an expressive majuscule arch that would communicate he was listening, if with incredulousness and distrust, he was too angry to communicate even an indictment.

Franco changed tracks on instinct, as if he suddenly wanted to avoid wasting time. "Quick question," he said. "Do you know everything?" There was no point pretending innocence if Stephen knew all about his involvement.

The next flash in Stephen's eyes was accompanied by an incredulous head tilt, and then a shake of the head.

He said, "I know enough," and he did sound pissed. Not as in drunk — as in irate with a dash of betrayed.

It didn't really matter. "You're not going to like what I'm about to say, but I don't think you would have liked it any better if you didn't know," said Franco.

"Cut to it then," Stephen said, taking an uncharacteristically aggressive step at Franco.

That was fine too, it would allow Franco to lower his voice a little, not that anyone would hear them over the jazz noise. Stephen was half a head taller than him, though. He had to look up to make eye contact.

"It's a piece of advice. You're probably going to hate me for saying this, and there's little I can add to convince you, but I hope for your sake you take it. It's coming from a place of friendship. If I didn't care what happens to you, I wouldn't bother. I want to help you. Just think about it. Justin Marius is going to win the board election. It's a matter of hours away, and I have insider information.

"He has it in the bag, and nothing will stop him. Nothing. Don't go down trying to be a hero, my friend."

He backed up and starting walking away backwards, not in small part because he didn't know what his friend was like when enraged, whether violence was a possibility, but also because there wasn't much more he could say.

"Seriously think about it. Don't become a martyr. Don't end up on the wrong side of the schism. Think about it carefully."

He yelled over the music and didn't care that everyone would hear the last part.

"Vote for Justin Marius."

Then he turned around and straight up ran from his friend.

Before I could turn around, Cristo found me next and grabbed me by the shoulders, one of which was still sore from when Franco grabbed it a second ago. And before that, Leander. "I need to talk to you."

"Should we go somewhere private?" I said.

"No, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. This thing isn't going to happen, it's not going to turn out how we want it to. It's impossible, your plan is impossible."

"I'm sure it's just a small setback," I said. "We still have two hours, it's plenty of time. Let me talk to Cytheria, it was a mistake to leave her alone until now. I don't know how I got so distracted. I think I can persuade Claudia Solace too. And Nova can—"

"Nova can't do anything but sabotage us. She's working with Marius and we're deluding ourselves. Unless my contact got lazy or dropped dead somehow, she's been with Calo Gloriam for most of the hour."

My jaw dropped, but I thought of an answer. "Maybe she thought of a way to get Angelus Gloriam's vote — and that of others who would come along with him."

"No. She connected Lien Cassus to the router. We don't know why, but for one reason or another she is working for Justin Marius, not us. That's not what I meant, though — why this is impossible. We can't prevent Justin Marius from being elected president of Constellation.

"We can change who votes for whom, to some extent. We can sway Exequis Solace, Solari, Donato, Fortunato, Aemilia, Laio, or Varian to vote for Sunyin Aura, but I'm willing to bet we can't change all of the above — because we can't change the outcome. Marius will be elected. It's the one thing we can't change."

"You think we can't sway six votes?"

"It's not about the numbers, it's about the outcome."

"I'm not following."

"Let me start over. I've been running around this party looking for someone who knows anything about the abduction of Milana Nox, instead of getting a good glass of wine into Cytheria Demarco's hand. I lost Diana Aemilia in the crowd, and I left Claudia Solace with Portia Nero. You wasted all night with Novus Fortunato. Nova's gone rogue, she may have secured Tony Solari's vote but that may have been a lie. The boss seems to have secured Varian, but not Donato. We're failing. We came into this with a calculated master plan, but instead of executing it we've been running around mindlessly distracted by things other than our main objectives. Have you secured Solin's fourteen loyal supporters for Exequi Aura? It's not a reprimand, I'm just making a point. It hit me a minute ago.

"One thing I never understood was why they killed Milana Nox. Not because they wouldn't go that far, but because it was a stupid play. Diana voted for Marius as instructed, and they could have let Milana go. The press from an accusation of abduction couldn't be worse than the accusation of murder — and Diana would be less likely to keep her silence forever once she had nothing left to lose. There was no reason for that woman to die if Diana complied.

"Unless she didn't. There are other explanations, someone got carried away, there was an accident. But maybe she didn't vote for Marius.

"She told the media she voted for Marius, and it was a lie she repeated it to me over and over again. She never told anyone that she stood up to him. That it was her fault, or her choice, to let Milana be sacrificed so that Diana could vote the way her heart guided her to. That she let Milana go. The sacrifice wasn't enough anyway. She stood up to him, but no one else did. Cytheria fell on her knees. Tony Solari folded like a leaf. Ignatius Varian kissed the new president's feet, and my mother, Claudia Solace Gloriam, begged for table scraps. Fifty executives on the board, and Diana Aemilia was the only one who refused, the only one who lost that day. If I'm right, anyway.

"Which leads me to my next point. Something you were too smart to realize, Exequi Stephen. You can't be like Diana Aemilia, you don't have the luxury of defying Justin Marius. You're such a genius and you wanted to beat him so badly you ran the chess moves through a million times to generate the winning scenario, but people aren't chess pieces and you missed the bigger picture — out beyond the board.

"If I win, I won't ever play, will I? The greater rules say that would be a time paradox. Obviously. I don't come back in time to stop President Marius taking over the company if he doesn't take over the company. He's going to win, isn't he, no matter what I do? No matter how good your strategy was, the game was rigged against you and there were rules you didn't even know about.

"I saw it first-hand, though. We're the chess pieces, silly. Not the players. And someone much bigger than us is playing with us. One side for us to win, the other side for Marius. That's why time stopped for me twice — once, when I saved Ilan, and once when I needed to escape his imprisonment. The rules say Marius has to win every time, but still, someone on our side helped me out, and I didn't understand why — and there's someone working against me, too. Not because they're against us, but because if I break the rules of reality I might break reality. We have to lose and Marius has to take Constellation. But at the end of this game, this time, something needs to change. For the next game.

"If I'm right, Diana can vote for Justin. Milana Nox can live. I'll talk to Marius and make it happen. You're going to have to vote for President Marius, too.

"And I'm not entirely sure about this, I hope I'm wrong, but with all this time paradoxness going on, I don't think I'm going to make it. For this to work I need to be cleaned up, I caused too much disorder; I made the sun move faster, not that the sun moves, but the planet spun faster or time on earth slowed relative to the rest of the universe — or maybe time in Soliara relative to the planet and beyond. Maybe wielding that much power uses up your eternal life, or maybe I'm too much of a threat to the cosmos. I just no longer see my future beyond the point in the timeline when I stepped through the time link. Maybe it's pessimism, but I don't think I get to keep going past that moment.

"But you need to, Potestas. You need to survive that point in the timeline when he was about to kill you all, and you need to be in a position to stop him from disabling the router's provision of immortality. Send me through the time link to my death, then stop him from effecting his genocide."

Cristo left Stephen with that. His daze started to feel like a feverish fugue. He couldn't tell whether his thoughts were foggy or crystal clear. In that state, and with his new priorities in mind, he set out looking for Diana Aemilia or Justin Marius, whoever he ran into first.

He ran into Marius, the handsome politician with the excellently formed curls waving to this chin, the nice tan, the crisp Windsor knot in his cornflower blue tie. No one dared bother him, and he was on his way to way to the bar as if to procure a drink for some woman who wasn't his wife. Because his wife was long dead, poor guy.

Cristo ran to catch up and suddenly had the sensation that he was going to run into the circular communication link that appeared in front of him, but the link moved with him as he moved; he was surprised at the sophisticated level of functionality since the very recent inception of links. A male voice came through the link saying, "Excuse me, Mr. Somnare? The woman left the library and returned to the party."

"Thank you," said Cristo. "Please follow her for me until I call with further instructions."

Too bad he couldn't instruct the waiter to take her out for him.

This business with Marius needed to be taken care of before he could take care of Nova.

For the umpteenth time tonight, he sidled up to the bar. He didn't order a drink this time, but he struck up a conversation with Justin Marius, future president of Constellation, and quickly told him that Diana Aemilia would vote for him.

"I'll have a magically binding contract for you within the hour," said Cristo.

I found Laio Cytheria out in the cold outside the Solarium with snowflakes burying her in her big black coat. Sitting on the ground. The wine glass in my hand felt silly. She didn't need alcohol, she needed to be rescued from freezing to death in the snow.

"Exequi Cytheria?" I said. I contemplated pretending the wine was for me. Which was sillier?

"I can't do it," she said.

"I think you should come inside. The Solarium will shelter us from the snow falling."

"It's too late for that," said Cytheria.

"Is it?" I said.

She turned and looked up at me with orbous glowing eyes, and she seemed to snap out of it. A few blinks later, clearing her eyelashes of snow, she took my offered hand and let me help her to stand. "I know what I have to do," she said.

"Really?" I said, and I surprised myself by laughing. "Because I don't." We shuffled together through seven inch thick snow to the door of the Solarium; the door opened itself for me, packing the snow in an arc as if to form the wing of a snow angel.

The masochistic matriarch stopped in her tracks and stayed out in the storm at the last instant. "That man is going to win," she said, carrying on a conversation she and I had never had.

"It's all right," I said, and I tried gently to drag her inside, thinking we can still die of hypothermia — or one would think that this hundred-and-five-year-old woman in the body of an eighty-five-year-old certainly can; I haven't visibly aged since my teenage years except to grow an inch taller and a few pounds fatter, I don't think the cold's going to kill me.

And I don't know how long she's been out here; I was busy with other, more useless, things.

"It's all right," I said again when she resisted. "I understand you have to vote for Marius to save your daughter's life. Yes, I know about that, and I know this is the only way. Don't let it kill you. The guilt. I'll tell you something, Exequi — we can't stop him from winning. I can't explain how I know that, but the future's set in stone — it's all already been done. We elected Marius as president of Constellation. You can change some things, but not that outcome. He's going to win, so you have to do what it takes to save your daughter." I leaned in close to say, "I understand," and that was when I noticed she was frowning.

She pushed past me into the greenhouse warmth and shrugged her coat right off. "No, I don't have to vote for him. I can tell you there's nothing you or anyone else can say to me to make me vote for the man behind the murder of my Tian, and when he kills Terra too I will haunt his every step until the day the truth comes out. If mobs don't behead him, he can spend his immortal life in Constellation regulation jail cells.

"You sound just like a future teller who came to my house this morning. He warned me that I was going to make a choice I would regret. He told me my children would die. I don't know how he knew that or what you know, but I won't vote for that man. And your father will stand with me."

I think Cristo's theory killed all hope I had that we could win today. "The Potestas vote will got to Marius," I said. "I'm sorry, it's the cowardly choice, but I've been convinced that the only way to survive and to stop Marius in the long run will be to support him today, and oppose him from the inside when he wins."

I didn't tell her why — that Marius's plan was to end the immortal life of everyone who opposed him.

She wasn't listening to me anyway. "You're right, you are a coward—" so she had heard that part "—I'm going to find your father and talk sense into him. This isn't over yet."

She walked away and to her retreating back I called, "My father's going to die," and I felt crazy for saying it because I had no way of knowing that. It's just a theory. A hypothesis. It needed to be proven with experimentation.

Thank you for reading Stars Rise. It's almost election hour, but many of the votes are in. Rigged, much? Please leave a vote for me if you are enjoying the story. This book updates often, and the final chapters will be released over the next week. I hope you enjoy the climax to come!