"1 can't tell you much about it, Roger. The hundred-year rule."
He scowled. "Now you want to obey the law?"
"I had to tell Laurent what the Emperor planned. I knew they'd catch me, but I had to save him. That's all I can say."
"They're calling for your blood, Nara."
"I know, Roger. I can hear them."
She gestured to bring up second sight. Synesthesia confirmed what Roger Niles and empathy had told her. The story choked every news-feed. She flipped across a few channels: her voice and picture, the text of a useless Apparatus warrant for her arrest, a Loyalist spokesperson demanding her expulsion from the Senate.
Expulsion was the crux of the matter, she realized. Stripped of senatorial privilege, Nara Oxham would be just another citizen. Just another traitor with no Pale to protect her.
"I warned you, Nara. Why didn't you listen?"
"Can they throw me out, Roger?"
"Of the Senate? There's precedent, but it hasn't been done for a hundred and fifty years." "What was the reason back then?"
Niles blinked, his fingers twitching. "Murder. A Utopian killed her lover. Strangled him in bed."
Oxham smiled wanly. She, at least, had broken the law to save a lover, not kill one.
"That's far more dramatic," she said.
"But it wasn't even a crime against the state," Niles said. "'Conduct unbecoming' was the phrase employed in the writ of expulsion. A lesser charge than treason, I dare say."
"How long did it take?" she asked.
"Forty-seven days. They held a trial before the full Senate. Witnesses, defense counsel, even a psychologist."
"And then they expelled her."
Niles nodded. "And with her privilege gone, a civilian court found her guilty of murder in a second trial. Loss of elevation, life internment."
"Better than exsanguination."
"God, Nara," Niles said, his voice breaking. "Did you actually do it? Reveal War Council secrets to Zai?"
"I did. To save him."
"There must be an exception for military exigency."
She shook her head. "There's no way out of it, Roger. It was pure treason: my lover over my sovereign. I made a choice."
Niles was silent for a moment, going into a data fugue. He stood over her, hands flexing as he tried to discover some exception to the hundred-year rule, his entire body flinching with the effort. He looked like a handeye gamer trying to escape some virtual maze, his face showing frustration at every roadblock and dead end.
Nara drifted back into second-sight newsfeeds. One showed a crowd gathered at the edge of the Pale, a Loyalist mob demanding that Oxham abdicate her privilege immediately and face a Court Imperial. Now that she was its target, the Loyalists' wonted righteous anger seemed less comical. On another feed was the Secularist Party whip, a young man who had replaced her after she'd been promoted to the War Council. He was calling for calm, stalling, trying to slow down the pace of events without appearing to support rank treason. She didn't envy him the job.
In the midst of this maelstrom, Nara felt oddly peaceful. The usual players of political drama--the political parties, the Apparatus's propaganda machine, the newsfeed hacks--had jumped into motion in the usual way, jostling for advantage, working damage control. She could feel the shifting ground in this contest for power, the tug of every carefully chosen word, every deliberately sculpted reading of Imperial law and Senate tradition. But at the center of this chaos was one immovable point: the Tightness of her own choice.
Nara Oxham felt purified by treason. After all her compromises, she had finally done something for a simple, unalloyed reason, no matter what the cost.
"I'm free, Roger."
His eyes snapped open. "What?"
"We can't fight the Emperor with pragmatism forever."
Niles shook his head hard; a few gray hairs jutted out as a result. His features seemed to be aging by the minute.
"This was not the time, Nara. There's a war on."
She understood his point. The Emperor was always at the peak of his power when defending the realm. But the argument cut both ways; at its peak was when power was most often abused.
"I'm going to tell the whole Risen Empire what I told Zai," she said. "The Emperor's plans for Legis."
Niles looked down at her in despair.
"They'll kill you," he whispered.
"Let them."
"Use whatever you know as leverage to bargain your way out."
She shook her head. There would be no escape for her, the Emperor would make sure of that.
"Nara, they'll drain your blood out, drop by drop."
"Not before I turn a generation against him." Niles swallowed. He was still looking, she knew, for a way out of this. Senator Oxham suddenly saw her old counselor's greatest limitation. However pure his hatred for the dead, Niles had always fought them cautiously, slowly laying his plans against them. He had no taste for drama.
"How old are you, Roger?"
"Damn old," he said. "Old enough to know how to stay alive."
"That's your problem. War requires sacrifice, sometimes."
"You're talking about suicide, Nara."
She nodded. "That's correct, Roger. A just and well-considered suicide."
Her counselor sat down next to her, deflated. She was shocked to see tears on his face.
"I spent three decades bringing you here, Senator," he said, and sobbed once.
"I know."
"And this is how you repay me?"
After a moment's silence, she knew the answer. "Yes. Absolutely."
They were quiet for a while. Oxham shut off her second sight, quenching the flow of opinion and grandstanding, the headlong rush to committees, hearings, and judgement, all the unwieldy maneuvers of a legislature turning on one of its own. The rising sun lanced into the crystals that had been carefully moved here from Niles's old office. Like a tree of tiny mirrors, they dappled the walls with a glimmering pattern.
Nara Oxham listened to Niles's labored breathing, and wished she could spare him this. She still needed his counsel. She hoped he wouldn't give up on her.
As if hearing her thoughts, the old man spread his hands and said, "What do you want me to do, Senator?"
She took hold of his arm.