"You always were trouble," said Cristo, and he kept talking while he thought to keep Nova from interrupting.

"But I prefer it when we're getting into trouble together."

To keep Nova from saying anything else that would further confound everything he knew about the world.

"It would be a waste of time to keep asking you the same questions, right?"

The first time he saw her, she had played mind games with him too — they had been twelve.

Dressed to the nines at a company dinner, seated next to him as if dynasties had paired them together only to rip them apart when the climate shifted, she peered at him as if scrutinizing head to toe and partway through an awkward introductory conversation between adolescents she decided to pretend she couldn't hear him over the volume of the room. Kept insisting that he repeat himself, louder. Within minutes he was yelling himself hoarse and the dinner guests fell silent in shock. His words rang in his ears and echoed off cavernous halls; his father smacked him on the arm and commanded him to eat his plate in silence. Playing innocent, she had waited until well after adult conversation had resumed before she cackled at him.

If she didn't know him, then something had gone wrong. He never said he would pay some kind of twisted price for Ilan Potestas's life.

"My tight schedule has wiggle room for the unlikely event of an unexpected delay, but nothing like this." That last moment as he said goodbye, the moonlight had gleamed on the tears on her cheeks, but she had laughed at him.

Maybe no one else saw it, but she gave a bitter laugh and whispered, "Go be a time traveler." Like she found something funny about the whole thing. It was impossible for her to be here — Cristo was the only one who could generate a temporal link for the revolution. "I didn't pencil in an interrogation with you because you can't possibly be here." Therefore, the rebel faction couldn't have sent her back. Only Constellation's leadership had the power. "Am I hallucinating?" Therefore, she had come to stop him.

She didn't break her act for a second. What he wanted was to see a crooked smile, for her to laugh at him, if she had turned evil shouldn't she rub it in his face? Instead she seemed to hardly breathe, he sensed she was holding her breath, brittle in his arms as he continued to pretend they were dancing, as if she were afraid. He recognized the tension in her jaw; she clenched it when she was stressed.

Too real to be a hallucination.

"I'll save him, Nova, don't worry," he found himself saying to the woman in his arms, because it was impossible for his woman to be here and it was impossible that his woman didn't know him and it was impossible that she had switched sides. The only possibility was that she had never met him in her life and this woman was a dear friend of Ilan Potestas, a man who had died before he and his wife had been born. "I'll save him."

"Right," she said, but she had this air of soothing a maniac and getting said maniac to do what she wanted him to.

Was that part of the performance?

One eye on the boss, he would kill to check his watch, his watch arm charged as if electrified begging for attention, even though the time on the clock at which Ilan Potestas had been murdered had already passed and the future had become uncertain — and if he checked it for a millionth time everyone spying and staring at him would wonder what he was up to.

"You look beautiful tonight," he said, "by the way," taking a step backwards away from her, then another, so he could watch her face as she reacted.

"Excuse me—"

"That dress makes you look kind of entitled," he said, walking backwards, "but you know what? It suits you." He turned at the last second and didn't get to see the face she made, the prize he had said it for, but he did picture it: a scowl followed by an accidental laugh smile she couldn't help that would disappear by the time she put the cat mask back on.

Cristo needed to get to Stephen Potestas first.

It all needed to happen fast, so that no one had time to ask him any questions. Everything needed to happen at once.

Rushing with planned, but not feigned, urgency, Cristo crashed into Stephen in the crowd — as planned. Leander accompanied him. Not as planned. Hurrying past, Cristo didn't stop as he said, "There's a security breach," the magic words to set the plan in motion, and he continued over whatever Stephen was about to say, "Sever the last three connections. Go now." Stephen stammered, "What? Do I know you?" but Cristo didn't answer.

He pushed onward a dozen strides and looked back to see, as expected, Stephen rush off to do what Cristo told him to — hopefully, quickly, and without asking any questions of anyone.

The last three connections. By that, Cristo meant the last three people connected to the magic router. He had known, always, what that meant. It meant that there was a traitor in Potestas Tower. The assassins wouldn't be able to fire a weapon in Potestas Tower without connection to the star dial. Someone on the inside had to have connected them.

It couldn't be Nova. It couldn't be Nova, because Nova wasn't here the first time around. When the boss had been killed.

Cristo had no idea who connected them. He would need to ask Stephen Potestas to check the router, to see if there were any clues as to who the traitor was. Because the first time around, the smartest man in the world had been stupid (having just lost his father) and hadn't checked.

It wasn't Nova. But. He couldn't think of any reason for her to have come back in time except to betray him, to turn to Marius's cause. Not if she was going to keep pretending not to know him. That made her a traitor too. Unless in the next five minutes she confided in him what she was really doing here.

Cristo noticed something. All eyes were on Nova. All the eyes that mattered, anyway. Cristo knew who was in the usurper's faction; he kept tabs on everyone present at the party who was involved. And they all gave Nova furtive glances every few seconds while the rest of the guests were dancing.

Cristo soared toward the boss. Leander crashed, not as planned, after Cristo.

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