I found Diana in a heap on a lounge couch. I touched her shoulder and shook her. It may not have been gentle. "Come with me," I said. I remembered the plan and I meant to follow it even though it came from him.

Diana sat up and blinked blearily. "Come," I said again. "Come with me and we'll get Milana to safety. Cristo was wrong, and he figured out he was wrong, and told me what to do. We have to vote for Marius."

She was getting to a stand and said, "I already did."

"The election hasn't happened yet," I snapped.

"I mean I promised," she said. "It's already taken care of. She'll be home before I am."

"So you did vote for him." Had Cristo been wrong about her defiance in the first place?

"I did?" she asked sleepily.

There really was no other way, though, even if he was wrong about that, wrong about a lot of things.

I left her where she was. I remembered the plan. I didn't remember that Nova was dead. I wanted to magic knowing out of my brain, I managed it without magic, I wanted to ask Marius if that was possible. He had a better grasp of theoretical magic science than even I did, I thought, because he would be the one to fix immortality. He would know the answer.

I found him and I promised. Justin Marius wanted me on his side, and I gave him what he wanted because that was the plan and what did anything . . . did it matter in the least? Future President Marius told me he would present me with a present, something beyond anything I could possibly imagine, beyond my wildest hopes and dreams. I don't have any hopes and dreams.

I told him whatever it is, I don't want it.

He said, "Yes, you do. Trust me. It's the only thing you ever wanted," and I have no idea what that means.

Hand on the hidden gnomon, Franco charged finally at Ilan where the old man who looked no older than thirty with black hair and skin smooth and soft as the day his son was born and ageless as the day he buried his wife a gray haired old lady was looking out the window at the snow waiting for someone to kill him, waiting to see who it would be to come kill him.

Knowing he was defenseless and there was no other way and no way to stop it.

Or at least that's what Franco believed Ilan Potestas was thinking while he looked out the window like that. 'Believed' wasn't even strong enough, 'knew' might not even be either somehow. Maybe 'read,' as if he read the boss's mind. Franco read that the boss knew there was no other way and nothing he could do to stop it.

Lucian was there but Angelus had left. Lucian shot through the crowd to latch himself to Franco, but Franco didn't see him with his eyes on Ilan Potestas, a relic from a far away time, a far behind time, and time would forget him. Even his son would forget the price of the world they were about to make. The amendment they were about to make. An amendment to immortality.

Stephen couldn't possibly miss the old man forever while he lived forever and went on living forever, with a wife and children too. The dead would be forgotten eventually.

Death itself would be.

Lucian said, "Nova Dasilva is dead." Franco moved forward. It didn't matter that Nova was dead. He held the gnomon. Nova was dead. He had tried to murder her a dozen times this week. It wasn't his doing. That was a relief. But not much of a relief, because he was about to end the life of someone else. Acario said, "If we had a way to connect to the star router, we don't now."

"We don't need it," Franco said. Instead of 'we don't need her.' He pulled the gnomon out of his coat. Brazenly. Before security could see it, he had to be done. He held it where they could see it. No more time for hesitation. He had to act.

He left Acario in his dust. He didn't need to stand right before Ilan, but he wanted to. The crowd was gone, it was just the two of them, when they had disappeared Franco had no idea but they were alone. The crowd was behind him.

He came toward Ilan with the knife-shaped gnomon glinting out in front of his chest. The boss watched him come. Ilan Potestas saw the gnomon and if he knew what it was, he knew he couldn't stop it, no one could stop it except Cristo with his future gnomon (Franco read as if reading his mind), but when Ilan yelled Cristo's name no one came, no one was there to save him a third time, and no sooner did the boss yell for Cristo did Franco unleash the unfair unstoppable power of Constellation's indomitable new device. The unfair impossible to stop, dodge, divert or deflect force went straight to his brain instead of crashing through his skull as if a bullet teleported inside and exploded.

Force the size of a marble teleported into his brain and displaced a marble sized amount of matter. It didn't make a sound. The boss died. The first indication security had was the moment the boss froze because he was dead and he fell down dead, and Franco could vanish before he plummeted as if from high up frozen dead as a doornail to the floor and Franco was gone before he crumpled there with brain torn and shredded from the inside out.

Justin Marius would be president of Constellation before anyone could find him.

He staggered as if wounded across Justin's grounds into the night toward Justin's estate and thought, the end of an era. The lights in the house flicked off, he stumbled and his chest heaved as if he were drained to exhaustion, but he wasn't. He was exhilarated, and owed a debt by the most powerful man in the world, whose lawn he collapsed down onto in the darkness and lying there he watched the stars overhead. When he blinked it was as if the stars went out too. When he closed his eyes and passed out drunk it was as if the stars went out, and he was okay with that.

Leander unsheathed his sword from Cristo's body with a strong jolting movement. The corpse fell to the ground hard as a rock, lay stiff as an ice statue, wide-eyed, staring without seeing, while Leander ripped a strip of cloth from his dress shirt to wipe the blade. He let the cloth fall next to the body. It fell in slow motion in the stopped mourning morning light.

At first he didn't look. His eyes pointed directly at the near star, Sol, for as long as he could stand it before he made himself turn his head down to the fallen time traveller, sniffing in the merciless cold air regretfully.

How quickly the problematic outsider had gone still, cold as lifeless stone, and began to meld into winter and ice, flecks of frost creeping up his digits. The snow fell slowly over him. Like it was resisting gravity and simultaneously dancing. If left where he was, he could be buried naturally, an unintrusive winter burial without human intervention. Hidden in the snow it would be spring before they found him. If it weren't for the heat lamps and the fact that this was a corporate building tower.

The eyes, still partway open, gazed past Leander into an abyss beyond. The skin already post-mordidly lost color, waxy, wet first from early snowflakes that melted on his cheeks, jaw, forehead, then slowly covered as it grew colder and the flakes settled to stay on the unwrinkled too youthful skin of his face. Powdery snow laced his black hair like graying strands, the only illusion of elderliness, maybe a suggestion of some wisdom beyond his years, but that was a matter up for debate, the topic of many arguments in the days and centuries to come — or not, because the revolution was dead and the best play for the revolutionaries was to keep quiet and pretend nothing happened.

The frost began to spread, encasing the corpse, claiming it like a greedy parasite. His skin took on a blue hue, and his lips; they were parted as if to keep lying, speaking manipulations that would bring about the collision of planets and the bursting of suns, but they were still frozen open eternally even as his words died with him. He could no longer use them to rearrange the stars.