much better than you’ve managed so far.”
“Yes,” Nadashe said. “I was rather annoyed with Drusin when I found out his moment of gloating led you directly to us. It was unfortunate.”
“Next time remind your co-conspirators to keep their fucking mouths shut.”
“That’s a very good idea, Kiva, thank you. I will.”
“Now what?” Kiva asked.
“Now you’ve passed the audition,” Nadashe said. “Further instructions are coming for both you and Drusin Wolfe. You’ll know them when you see them.”
“That’s vague.”
“You won’t miss them, I promise. Goodbye, Kiva. I’m looking forward to getting mine, and to you getting yours.” The earpiece went dead.
What an asshole, Kiva said to herself. She pulled the earpiece out of her ear canal.
By and large that “meeting” had gone as well as Kiva had expected it would. She didn’t expect Nadashe to welcome her with open arms; that wasn’t the point. The point at the moment was to build détente, and to start gathering information, the better to shove the right sticks into the right gears at the right time. Grayland didn’t want her to destroy this coup; she wanted Kiva to grind it to a halt and look helpful as she did it.
I can do that, Kiva thought. Senia was right: When it came to blowing up other people’s plans, Kiva was the best, and was getting better as she went along. And this little adventure was right in line with Kiva’s decision, made not long after her first tussle with the House of Wolfe, to force change on others for the betterment of all, whether they wanted it or not. This coup attempt was going to fucking fail, and it would be because of Kiva, and when it was done maybe the Interdependency, or at least its people, would be that much closer to being saved.
And I’ll have punted the fucking Nohamapetans into the sun, Kiva thought. And, well. That would be a bonus.
“What did she say?” Drusin Wolfe asked.
“You want a transcript of the whole fucking conversation?” Kiva asked. She looked down to slip the earpiece into her coat pocket.
“Just what we’re supposed to do next.”
“She said further instructions are coming.”
“I wonder what that means.”
“You tell me, you’re the original co-conspirator,” Kiva said, looking up just in time to see a hole sprout out of Drusin Wolfe’s nose, above his left nostril. Drusin blinked once, looked at Kiva and then fell backward.
Kiva heard a clatter and turned to see a handgun settling onto the boulevard, people beginning to scream and run, and a person of indeterminate personal attributes lifting a weapon up to her face. Before everything went black Kiva had time for a final thought:
Well, fuck. She really did curse me.
Chapter 13
“Okay, this gets complicated,” Marce said. He fumbled with his tablet to call up his latest presentation.
Cardenia kept herself from giggling at the warning. “I know that,” she said. “Remember what we’re doing. Your job is to make what you’re about to say comprehensible to people who aren’t Flow physicists. Politicians. Journalists. Normal humans. Me.”
“You’re not normal,” Marce pointed out.
“No,” Cardenia allowed. “But once upon a time I almost was. I’m definitely not a Flow physicist, however. For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll do.”
The two of them were in the small media theater attached to Cardenia’s personal apartments. It could seat about twenty-five and was where the emperox, when she felt like letting her hair down, could invite friends to watch the latest entertainments on a large screen with genuinely amazing sound.
That was the theory, at least. In reality, by the time Cardenia was done with her daily tasks as emperox, the last thing she wanted to do was to have a couple dozen people whooping and yelling at something bright and noisy. She mostly just crawled into bed with Marce, and if the two of them watched anything, it would be on one of their tablets, propped up by one of their knees. Marce had once observed the irony of the most powerful person in the known universe consuming media like a starving college student; Cardenia had replied by hauling him out of bed and making him watch their show in the theater. They ended up watching five minutes of the show and then did something else entirely, which did not involve watching what was up on the screen.
Cardenia smiled at the memory. What they were doing in the theater now was not what they had done then.
“Okay,” Marce said, and then activated his slideshow on the theater’s very large screen. The